Sacrificed
by EmmBee
Summary: No one questions the sacrifice. It was established in the sacred texts and has been upheld by law and culture for hundreds of years. So when her name is drawn by the high priest, Kalima is sure it is the end. But as she is prepared to be sacrificed, she begins to uncover truths about the world she thought she knew...and, ultimately, the truth about herself.
1. Chapter 1

Part One

_A Crime:_  
_Seventeen Turns Ago_

She paced as she waited, the gusty wind plucking at her strung-tight nerves like fingers at a yupper. There were ten steps between the half-dead geena tree and the blank outer face of the palace wall, and she covered the distance in five. She didn't notice him standing there beneath the tree until he put a hand on her shoulder and brought her feet—and heart—skittering to a stop.

"It's all right, it's all right," he said quickly. "It's just me."

She pressed her palm to her chest and sucked in a breath. "Great god Eris, you scared me!"

He smiled apology and took a step toward her. The hand on her shoulder traced down her arm, making her at once glad she was wearing sleeves to cover the little bumps his touch scattered across her skin and disappointed that the fabric prevented her from really feeling him. She imagined what it would be like for that gentle touch to be repeated on her bare arm, skin against skin with no rough-spun fabric between them to muffle the sensation….

If she hadn't already known it was time to end it, that image flashing behind her eyes and stirring something deep inside her would've told her so. It was madness that one little touch, barely more than the suggestion of his fingers on her sleeve, had the power to strip her of her strength and mind.

He was watching her, his eyes scrutinizing her face, noticing every flicker of the eyes and twitch of the lips. His eyebrows pulled up in the middle: his anxious expression. "What's wrong?" he asked.

She was going to break his heart, too, and that was unforgivable. Her pain, she could handle—but she hated herself for even thinking about hurting him.

But she answered him. "We can't do this anymore."

"Do this?" he repeated slowly, confused.

"This. You and me." Her voice wanted to waver; she pulled in a breath and forced it to stay steady. "It's wrong. It's a crime and a sin—"

"Don't," he interrupted. "I don't care. Don't you know, can't you _feel_ that? I don't care."

"And death—"

He interrupted her again, this time by kissing her and shocking the words right out of her. He'd never kissed her before. She thought he wouldn't, that even he would respect the wrongness of it. His lips were gentle, almost hesitant, as though he was waiting for her to approve, as though he worried that she might reject him.

Reject him! She stepped toward him, closing the last hand's-breadth of space between them, and wrapped her arms around his neck. She was having trouble breathing, and maybe that should've mattered, but it didn't. He was kissing her—the heavens could stop turning in the sky, and it wouldn't matter.

He was the first to pull back, just far enough to reclaim use of his lips. His breath was fast and shallow on her face. "You were saying something?" he said, trying to joke, but his words were unsteady.

She opened her eyes slowly and looked at him. The suns were behind him, reflecting off the gold in his hair and throwing his face in shadow. She put her hands flat against his chest but couldn't quite make herself push him back. "This has to end."

He pressed his lips to her forehead. "No."

"It must."

He looked past her, toward a tree branch that was bouncing in a gust of wind, his face thoughtful, but she could feel his heart hammering under her palm, could sense almost without trying the desperation building up under his stilled expression. When he spoke again, his voice was almost too low to hear. "Then tell me you don't love me."

"That's not the point."

"Then what is?"

She pushed herself away from him, spun around, and stalked off, but she only got as far as the tree before her frustration, and the strength that came with it, drained away. She slumped to the ground, the trunk against her back, and hid her face in her hands. Her throat clogged with tears.

She didn't hear him sit down beside her, but, a moment later, he took one of her hands from her face and held it to his lips. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I love you."

She looked over at him. A tear escaped down her cheek; he wiped it away before she could. "I love you, too," she said. "But it's not that simple."

"I know."

He kissed her once, gently, then again more lingeringly. She closed her eyes, twisted her fingers in his hair, and kissed him back. Her every heartbeat seemed to be hollowing her out. She'd felt desire before, but never like this, never with this intensity. She didn't try to push it down.

She was through being good.

He must've felt the change, because he pulled back, his voice rushed. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'll stop if you want."

She touched her lips to his cheek, his eyelids, the little crease frowning made between his eyebrows, down his nose, and finally back to his mouth. She needed him like she needed air—what a fool she'd been to think otherwise. "No," she breathed against his lips. "I want."


	2. Chapter 2

The morning of the drawing, I wake up before dawn, my eyes creaking open in almost complete blackness to the whisper of Mami's praying. There's just enough light coming off the mostly-dead fire to see her kneeling in the unswept ashes, hunched over, her hands spread wide and flat on the ground.

Just like she was when I finally fell asleep. I wonder if she's been at it all night, or if she woke up early to continue.

I roll onto my my back, slowly, keeping my cot from creaking, and stare up at the holes in our mud-grass ceiling. Beyond it, the sky is getting gray. My stomach twists sloshily, making noise. The suns will be up soon.

Mami stands and comes over to my cot. "Kalima," she says, "are you awake?"

I nod, not sure if she can see it, but I don't trust my voice this morning.

She touches my forehead, strokes the little braids by my temple. "Are you hungry?"

"No." I was right to not trust my voice—it shakes even over that one little word.

"Well, come and eat something anyway. We have to be in the square at sunrise."

I sigh and hold my blanket tighter to my chin as though it can protect me, but then push it back and roll onto my feet. There's nothing to be done about it—if they find out you skipped the drawing, the elders haul you into the white stone palace and cut your head off. It's happened before, to my aunt Fikie's neighbor's little brother.

Mami wraps an arm around my shoulders and sits us by the fire. She's been warming a loaf of puffy sweet bread on the coals, and she takes it off the fire and cuts us each a slice.

I bite into the bread and chew slowly. Puffy sweet bread is expensive, and on any other day, I'd gobble down the first slice almost too fast to taste it, then eat the rest of it slowly, slice by slice. But this morning, the bread sticks in my throat like a wad of river mud and hits my stomach with a sickening clunk. I clench my teeth together and hand the slice back to her. "I'm not hungry."

"All right." She wraps the pieces up with the rest of the loaf in a scrap of cloth. "We'll save it for tonight. To celebrate."

I nod.

Mami slides around so that she's sitting behind me and runs her fingers through the tiny braids of my hair, straightening them out of the tangle my restless night had put them into. Her fingers are cold. "It's going to be all right, Kalima. It's just another drawing."

"I know."

The single flicker of fire goes out with a streak of smoke.

Mami slides an arm across my front and pulls me back against her. "Your name won't be drawn."

She says it with sureness, as if she has some way of knowing what will happen, but we both know that's a lie. She doesn't know. No one does—it's one of Eris's mysteries until the moment the high priest actually draws the name.

Still, some of my fear leaks out of me as she says the words, replaced by calmness. It won't last—even Mami can't keep my heart quiet this morning—but the moment at least gives me the chance to pull in a breath and remind myself that it's just a drawing, no different than any of the others I've been to.

Maybe the chances of me being drawn are a little higher than last turn because there were about ten kids who are too old now, but there's still plenty of us left. My chances of not being drawn are still pretty good.

As the sky lightens, Mami and I hurry through morning prayers and join the people headed toward the town square. I try to hang back some to avoid the usual staring, but Mami walks with a sort of purpose near spot where the bodies are thick, and I recognize our nearest neighbor, Setara, in the huddle. She's one of the only people who didn't tell Mami to drop me in the river when I was born and who hasn't gone out of her way to make me feel like the child of sin my washed-out skin and blue eyes proves I am. Her oldest daughter turned ten just last week, and I can see Gayli now, clinging to her mami's hand and her eyes wide as those monster clams that sometimes drift downriver after a bad storm. Mami walks with them, one hand on Setara's arm and sometimes reaching down to touch Gayli's head, the other wrapped tight around one of my hands.

Even though the suns haven't come up yet, the town square is already a mess of people and noises when we get there, mostly the high priest's servants in their deep green tunics preparing for the drawing, herding the Anami into our own partitioned-off corner of the square, taking and checking off names, lighting little sticks of incense and placing them around the temple steps. Six grunting servants haul a brass tub large enough to lay down in out from the temple.

That would be the tub with all the names in it. My heart stutters.

Then there is a servant calling the Anami children forward. A few break out of the group on their own, or with a single push on their backs. A few are escorted by servants. I turn to Mami and wrap my arms around her before a servant comes for me, too.

She holds me tight for several long breaths. "I love you, Kalima," she whispers, her voice as tight as her grip. "I love you so, so much."

I feel fingers on my sleeve, and a servant is beside me, wearing a grimace that says he, a servant to the high priest of Eris, is too good to touch an Anami. I try to say something back to Mami, tell her that I love her, but the only sound that comes out is a squeak. I close my eyes against the sight of the servant, and, for the smallest fraction of a second, the fear inside me drains a little.

Mami is very good at easing. The best, in fact. I'll never be as good, not even if I got the mind to try.

I linger for a moment in borrowed calmness, until the servant finally sighs. "C'mon, girl," he says, tugging at my sleeve.

I push myself away from Mami and let him lead me through the crowd toward the temple steps. I stumble once on my way up the steps and think I hear someone chuckle, but the square is noisy, so maybe they were laughing at something else.

It always surprises me when, from the top of the temple steps, I can see the entire square; in my mind, it's always huge and grand and ringed with magnificent buildings that reach the clouds—but, really, it's not very big at all, maybe just large enough to fit the cluster of huts that makes up our little village, and, except that they're made of stone and wood and sturdy enough to have a second floor, the buildings aren't very impressive. Except for the temple, of course, which is huge and white and has four marble statues by the door of faceless people with their hands stretched up in praise, and the white stone palace on the top of the hill. The square's packed to bursting with people, townfolk mostly, every one of them flashing their traditional glass beads that'll be dazzling when the suns come up.

The way the buildings are arranged leaves a good view of the sunrise horizon, with the palace in front and the low band of sharp wasteland hills in back, and now everyone is facing toward that place, waiting. Expectant.

The suns come up slowly, one ray at a time, like a child being forced out of bed. And, just as the first bit of the actual suns peak over the horizon, the palace door opens, and the entire Sahnsor court appears.

* * *

They are always a sight, practically glowing where the sunlight strikes their brilliant white robes, and they come down the steps from the palace to the square in formation: the oldest elder, a decrepit old man with his hair mostly fallen out, at the point and flanked by the other twenty Sahnsor who make up the elderhood. The others, the elders' brothers and sons and grandsons, fill in the formation so that altogether they look like a solid triangle, their bald-headed wives following behind them as more of a jumble. Every single one of them gives off a feeling of such absolute power that Eris himself floating down from the clouds surrounded by the multitude of his angels wouldn't dare cross their path.

The sight of them silences the town as always, and they drift across the square to stand at the temple steps facing out into the crowd. A few townfolk lean to the side and whisper to their neighbors. One or two even bow their heads and lift their hands to the sky.

One elder , not the oldest one, but probably the second seat considering the way he takes charge like he has the right to, holds up a hand, and the townfolk go silent again. He clicks at the audience, fast insect-like clicking that is the Sahnsor's language, pausing every few moments so the high priest can translate what he's saying. "Dear brethren," says the high priest in a voice like a thunderclap: loud and resonant, "we are honored to be here in your presence on this holy day."

Pause for clicking.

"We accept your welcome and extend our own to our dear kinsmen and fellow children of our great god Ei'ris." He pronounces the god's name as a Sahnsor name, which is the correct way to say it but not easy without being able to click your tongue just so in the middle of it.

The court shifts all as one, coming to stand directly in front of the temple steps, still facing toward the crowd. Someone beside me whimpers. I glance over to see Gayli biting her lip and trembling, tears falling down her face and more in her eyes. I know I shouldn't, that if anyone catches me there might be punishment, but I reach for her hand anyway. She's so afraid that I can feel her fear almost right away, almost without trying. I tug at it a little, too afraid my own self to be able to ease it completely, but enough that I can feel strands of it pulling off her like unraveling a knitted sweater. I imagine it a lump of something physical, an actual ball of yarn or something, and imagine pushing it down toward my toes the way Mami's been trying to teach me, but it doesn't work. Those strands of little-girl fear stay individual strands floating around somewhere in my chest, and I stop pulling.

Still, when she looks up at me, Gayli smiles, a tense, frozen smile, but grateful. I smile back at her and squeeze her hand. She's a pretty child, tiny even for her age, with skin, hair, and eyes all dark as wet river mud, and, for a moment, I'm able to stop praying for myself long enough to send up a prayer for her, too.

As if Eris would listen to the prayers of an Anami, and an Anami who's never had a papi at that.

The high priest crosses in front of us to stand beside the large brass tub, and the elder, the one who'd spoken, nods once, with purpose. A signal.

The high priest nods back and holds his hands over the tub, palms up, closes his eyes, and begins to chant in the Sahnsor's clicking-insect language. I'm glad I don't understand what he's saying; somehow, I can't believe I'd like it if I did.

My fingers are tight around Gayli's, probably cutting off the blood, but she's clenching my fingers back, so I don't let go. I squeeze my eyes shut and keep praying, desperation giving the thoughts an edge they didn't have before.

_Eris, let it not be me, let it not be me. Let me go home with Mami and live a long life. Let it not be me, let it please not be me…._

The high priest's chant ends, but my eyes stay closed, my thoughts stay praying.

_Let it not be me let it not be me…._

The sound of paper swishing against the sides of the tub.

_Let me go home with Mami…._

From somewhere on the other side of the square, someone shifts, rustling clothes. The silence is so complete that that tiny noise is as loud as a shout. My ears hum.

_Please, please, let it not be me…._

And then the high priest's voice, in my own language, cutting through the silence. "And now I introduce you to our sacrifice, the honored child chosen to cleanse us of our sins. Have the grace to step forward, Anami Kalima."

* * *

Well.

There it is.

My eyes open, and the loop of prayer that has been running through my head since sunset yesterday stops like a candle snuffed between wet fingers. Gayli drops my hand with a huff of relief.

The high priest is standing in front of us still, the brass tub at his feet. His arms are outstretched, his head tilted back, his eyes squeezed shut, clicking quickly, almost furiously.

I hesitate to push through the other kids around me and interrupt his prayer, but he beckons to me without opening his eyes or breaking his rhythm, so I inch forward. My foot catches the edge of my skirt hem, and I stumble, accidently bumping against one of the high priest's outstretched arms.

His eyes open then, and he drops his arms and glares at me with such an expression that I back up like I just bumped into a vasp nest. (Of course, it's nothing like bumping into a vasp nest; vasp stings are rarely fatal.) Everyone is looking at me. Someone in the back of the crowd snickers. I bow my head and lift my hands a little, but I don't dare apologize, not out loud, because the only thing more forbidden than talking to the high priest would be talking to a Sahnsor.

And, in looking down, I catch a glimpse of the roll of paper in his hand, the one he'd drawn from the tub and read for the crowd. The one with my name on it. He's still holding it open, delicately, with just the tips of his fingers. It's a sacred object now, I suppose. The name of the sacrifice—it'll go with all the other names into the temple to be preserved and tended to until the ink fades and the paper turns to dust.

But it's not the way he touches the paper with my name on it that catches and holds my attention as the high priest puts himself back into the prayer-for-Eris's-glory position and resumes his clicking.

What holds my attention is the fact that my name is not on the paper.


	3. Chapter 3

Blank. The paper is blank. But how can the high priest read my name off a blank piece of paper?

He finishes his prayer, lifts his hand with the paper still in it toward the sky but keeps it turned so that the crowd can't see the side he read from. The sunlight strikes the paper like an elder's robe, so sharply white that looking at it hurts. Then the high priest hands the paper to a waiting servant. I see her look at it, the way her eyes flicker down its length, but she rolls it up and tucks it into a pocket on the front of her tunic without so much as a blink.

Like it's all to be expected.

The high priest's servants shuffle me forward with hands on my shoulders and back, urging me into the middle of the court's formation, and the court closes around me without even looking in my direction. I want to follow the servants back out again, creep out through the small breaks between one white-robed shoulder and the next, drop onto my hands and knees and crawl under their legs, something, but I can't.

How could the paper be blank? The sacrifice is the oldest and most sacred ritual in the world—you can't just go around changing the way it works.

The suns are fully risen now, the last bottom edge finally clear of the sharp hills, their sides just barely touching. The court one at at time begin to lift their hands, palms out, fingers splayed, until I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of upraised white hands. I'm supposed to join in—this is the only moment when everyone, Anami and townfolk and Sahnsor, is meant to be equal under Eris's greatness—but I don't.

Then the circle begins to move, turning toward the steps to the palace. They walk slowly, keeping a careful two steps between me and them on all sides; I wrap my arms around myself, trying to take up as little space as possible, and walk lightly so that I don't touch their hems with even the dust from my feet.

"Kalima!" Mami. She shouts above the growing noise in the square. "No, let me go! _Kalima_!"

I start to turn toward the sound of her voice, but the wall of brilliant white is coming at me like a predatory animal. I want to shout back to her, tell her I love her, say something about the paper, but, when I open my mouth, I find my voice has shriveled up in my throat. I half-stumble back a few steps, turn around again, and look away from all the white.

And, in doing so, catch one of the Sahnsor looking at me.

He has green along the edges of his robe, so he isn't an elder, but he is looking at me, and he doesn't look away when I meet his eyes. He's not old—maybe older than Mami, but certainly no more than forty turns—and still youthful, without the saggy skin or thinning hair or sticking-out bellies of those around him, but there are dark rings under his eyes, and a weary slump to his shoulders, and gray strands tangling into his otherwise-gold hair, cut Sahnsor-style to his shoulders.

I smile at him, not too wide that anyone else would notice. I don't know why—my mind's floated away from my head and left me feeling that smiling is the only thing I can reliably do. He smiles back, so faintly that it's not even really a smile, but more just a loosening of the muscles around his mouth. And then another Sahnsor walking beside him mumbles something I can't hear, and he looks away, fast, like he was caught doing something horrible.

Which, I suppose, he was.

* * *

The steps up to the white stone palace are vast; there's even a story that trying to walk them is like trying to count the stars in the clear night sky, and once a girl tried, and she walked and walked until her skin withered and her bones turned to dust, and still she hadn't gone up but the first few steps. It's not true, obviously, or the court would never be able to get to the town square, but that's the story Mami told me the first time I asked about the palace, and now, walking up them, I'm tempted to believe it. There are hundreds of steps, maybe thousands, and the Sahnsor never seem to get tired, even the fat ones and the old ones, while I'm puffing for breath after the first handful. And finally, we are inside the palace, and the elder I think is probably the second seat turns and closes the heavy marble door behind the last wife. The lock grinds into place like stone rubbing against stone, and the sound turns my blood to ice.

No way out.

The court formation begins to break up once the door's locked; a couple wander off the right, the wives all disappear to the left, and more trickle off in groups of two or three down the several hallways in front, but no one seems willing to deal with me. What are they expecting me to do, wander away from the door to spend the few remaining days of my life lost in their palace? Not likely.

Eventually, I am alone by the door except for the Sahnsor who looked at me, and his friend. They're arguing, if the frustrated gesturing and increasing speed of their clicking are anything to go by, and whatever they're arguing about seems to be important—the friend's cheeks are almost the same dull red as his hair, and his eyes keep flicking in my direction and then away again before I could say he is looking at me. The other Sahnsor isn't red-faced or pacy like his friend, just quiet and serious. Decided, like he's already thought through everything his friend could say to him and doesn't care.

Then the friend holds up a finger, makes a few stern sounds that remind me of nothing so much as Mami saying "You've been warned," and sweeps down one of the to-the-front halls. His green hem flutters out behind him.

The Sahnsor watches him go, waits until he's disappeared from sight, then turns and smiles. It's an odd smile, not happy or embarrassed or pained—maybe all three, packed together so tight that even the smile can't decide what it's suppose to be.

I'm staring. I realize this and look away just one quick heartbeat after he turns to face me, but it's already too late. I was staring at him, and he caught me doing it. Stories of Sahnsor punishment flash through my head: imprisonment, flogging, cutting off fingers or heads. Morakee, my childhood sort-of friend, even said once that they can burn you without fire, with little wires attached to your skin. (Of course, Morakee also said once that there are people who live on the stars and come to our world in huge silver carriages like Eris descending from the clouds, so it's hard to believe what she says.) At any rate, this Sahnsor will certainly have enough punishments to choose from.

He pulls in a breath and lets it out again, slow, and, when he finally says something, his voice is quiet. "I know nothing I can say will make these next ten days any better for you, but, if there is anything I can do, you need only to ask."

Not exactly what I was expecting.

I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head to clear it, but, when I open my eyes again, he's still there, watching me with a frown that looks more earnest than angry. My voice squeaks through my throat. "You're…you're not going to have me flogged?"

He smiles again, properly this time, with tired humor. "Flogged?"

"Because I was staring."

"And that's forbidden?"

"Absolutely forbidden," I correct him.

He shakes his head. "No, Kalima, I'm not going to have you flogged," he says.

I've never heard a Sahnsor say my name before—never heard a Sahnsor speak my language before. It's a rough, nasally sound, with tongue-clicks punctuating the sharp letters, like it might sound if a pincer-bug could talk, but not entirely unpleasant. "How do you—" I start to say, but then cut myself off before finishing the question and lean back into the door, feeling the marble's coldness seep through my tunic. Of course he knows my name. He was in the square. He heard the high priest say it.

He seems to accept the fact that I've answered my own question and doesn't embarrass me by answering it anyway. "I'm Tí'ath," he says instead. "Oldest son of Elder Jí'als, second seat and Holder of the Broaken Chalice."

Great god Eris, this man isn't just a Sahnsor—he's an important one, in line for the second-highest position in the elderhood. Forget flogging—he _should _have me beheaded.

For a couple of heartbeats, he doesn't say anything else, but just looks at me. His eyes are very blue, the color of a clear summer sky, and it makes my skin crawl. Is this what it's like for other people when I look at them? At least on him, with his going-gray gold hair and white skin, the blue doesn't look entirely unnatural.

When he does speak again, it's abrupt. "This way. There's a room prepared for you." And he spins on his heels and starts down the far right hallway.

I almost have to run to keep up. The palace is enormous, bigger than any place I've ever seen or imagined; I follow him down hallway after door-lined white hallway for a long time. None of the halls have windows—sunlight streams in through large circular holes in the ceiling, and where there aren't ceiling-holes, torches lit with a strange smokeless fire burn in sconces.

Everything is blinding white: the walls, the ceiling, the doors. Even the fire burning on the white torches is white, the sort of blazing-hot white in the center of metal-melting fires. The brightness makes my head hurt.

He sees the other person before I do, probably because his eyes must be used to all this aching brightness. He jerks to a stop, and I do, too, staggering a little to one side to keep from bumping into him, and he stands very still for a moment, not even breathing as best I can tell. Then the person comes out from directly underneath one of the ceiling-holes, and Sahnsor Tí'ath exhales. "You," he says to the person, beckoning with a hand. "Come here."

The other person steps forward. She is a girl, maybe just younger than I am, shaved bald and naked but for a green-and-white striped cloth around her hips and a silver tag around her neck. A slave. Mami said they had slaves in the palace, people to do the chores and obey orders. I smile at her, but her eyes are fixed on the floor, and she doesn't see it.

Sahnsor Tí'ath lifts the girl's tag as far up as it will go on its short chain, looks at it quickly, then nods, apparently satisfied. "Sahnsor Pí'lat sent you?"

"Yes, sir," she says, her voice barely a whisper.

"Good. Take the Anami to her room."

"Yes, sir." The slave girl turns and starts back the way she came. When I don't immediately follow, she pauses. "This way."

I glance at the Sahnsor; he smiles faintly. "Go on," he says, then walks away so fast he might have been running.

Which leaves me no choice but to follow the slave. I wait until I'm sure the Sahnsor is well gone before turning to the girl and smiling again. "I'm Kalima," I say. "What's your name?"

But the girl doesn't answer; she just keeps walking, her eyes on the floor and her face blank as the stones of the hallway. My stomach turns over once, and I follow her, silent again.

She leads me on and on, through a dozen more hallways and into a garden. It's huge, at least fifty steps across in all directions, full of large square plots of flowers: the reds and blues and whites are unfamiliar, but there's no mistaking the drooping sunset-orange petals on the liali, even so much bigger and brighter than the wild liali that grow in tangles along the riverbank. White-rock paths lined with geena trees in full bloom cut through the flower plots like a grid, and in the middle is a white marble fountain, a statue of a woman with a basket cradled in one arm and water spurting out from the tips of what looks like horns she holds above her head. But it's all surrounded by high marble walls, and a clear dome of patterned glass arches over the top. Still closed inside the palace.

The slave girl leads me down one of the paths, then back into marble hallways, but only for another minute. She stops at a closed door just one sharp left turn from the garden, kneels in front of the doorknob, and, in a movement so awkward she must've practiced it a thousand times to keep from choking herself, slides her silver tag into the lock and twists. The door pops open a finger-width.

"My room?" I ask quietly.

She stands up and steps back a little. "Yes, miss."

"Okay. Thank you." I push open the door and go into the room.

It's a huge room, at least five times the size of Mami and my one-room home on the river, and so grand. The entire back wall is made of glass. It looks out at the garden, at the fountain, so it's almost like it looks outside. The ceiling is taller than me by maybe three times and rounded, not quite a dome, with one large sunlight-bringing hole in the middle. A cord of metal links hangs from the ceiling above the bed—bed! I've never seen a bed before, not up close, anyway, and it's big enough to be its own country, piled with sharply-tucked white blankets and starched white pillows. I think about all the rooms I passed on my way here, dozens, maybe hundreds, and all probably five times bigger than this one…my head hurts trying to understand just how _big_ the palace is.

The slave girl comes quietly in behind me and goes to the small round table by the bed. There's a pot and cup already on the table—I guess that's what Sahnsor Ti'ath meant by "prepared" for me. She gives me the cup, then fills it with something steamy that smells—and tastes—like tea made from mud-grass and silt.

"Will there be anything else, miss?" the slave girl asks.

I swallow the mouthful of liquid and try not to gag. "No, I'm good. Thank you."

She doesn't move.

"Um…you can go now?" It comes out as a question.

"Ring if you need me."

"Okay. Thank you."

She turns out of the room and closes the door.

And, very faintly, I hear the lock click back into place.

* * *

They're locking me in.

That's to be expected, I suppose. I bet there've been a lot of Anami who've tried to escape over the past thousand or more turns. Though, honestly, if I was determined to escape, I wouldn't even bother with the door—I'd go through the glass wall and out to the garden.

What I'd do after that, though, I can't say. The garden walls are impossibly high, too smooth and perfect to climb. And, even if they weren't, even if there was handholds and footholds in the stone deliberately placed for climbing, there's no way I'd be able to break through the glass dome, not without making enough noise to wake Oxx and all his demons.

Well. I wasn't thinking I could escape, anyway. Not really.

I wander over to the table, set the cup down undrunk, run my fingers over the top blanket on the bed. It's thick and soft, so unlike the thin blanket and scratchy cot I've slept on my whole life.

And then all the fear I've been fighting to ignore since waking up this morning, the shock I've been pushing down since the high priest said my name, the panic that's been building underneath everything else—it all crashes down on me now, crushing my breath, turning my legs to water. I drop hard onto the bed and lean my forehead into my hands, and that's when the tears come.

Ten days. That's all the time I have left, and I'm going to spend it here, locked inside these marble walls. And at the end of it, when the two suns merge into one, I'm going to be laid down on the temple altar, and the high priest is going to cut my arms and throat, and I'll bleed to death for the world's sins.

I curl up on my side with my feet still dangling toward the floor, grab one of the bright-white pillows, and bury my face into its softness. My head sinks into it almost all the way to the mattress, and it feels like the pillow might smother me, but, at least when the real panic hits, there's a wall of duk down to keep my screams from echoing through the palace.

I cry and cry, sometimes screaming and sobbing and filling my mouth with feathers and bile, sometimes silent, shaking and fighting for breath. I cry until my eyes are sandy and sore, and I'm dried up like jerky. It must've been hours, but when I finally roll my face out of the pillow and look out the glass wall again, the light doesn't seem changed; it's still too bright on the garden, and I have to squint at the glare coming off the wall.

Is it because of the glass ceiling that the light is so bright, or the marble? Or is it really possible that not a lot of time has passed, and I'm still living the same day that started this morning at home on the river?


	4. Chapter 4

I've never spent much time alone; in our hut only big enough to fit our cots, a small fire, and just enough open space for us to sit, me and Mami don't have anything resembling privacy. Sometimes she goes to town without me, and in the evenings sometimes I walk downriver to the ridge that marks the end of habitable land, where the river tumbles over the edge of a cliff and disappears into wasteland, but we're always together otherwise. So, this whole enormous room with its enormous bed and glass wall, all to myself—it's not pleasant.

My childhood sort-of friend Morakee once told me a story her papi told her about a boy killing himself before the sacrifice. "He went mad one day and just stabbed himself, clear to the heart with a bread-knife," she said.

"Really?" I asked, skeptical.

Morakee nodded. "Really! It happened when my papi was a little boy, and he remembers it. They kept it a secret, obviously, but they brought all the of-age Anami into the palace one night and had to have another drawing and everything."

"And no one noticed that the person they sacrificed wasn't the same person as the day of the drawing?"

"Well, he had a twin brother who looked so like him that even their mami couldn't tell them apart, and that's who they ended up sacrificing instead."

"Now I know you're lying."

"Am not! My papi remembers it, and yours would, too, if you had one." She poked my shoulder with one stiff finger.

I winced, but met her eyes and said firmly, "I've got a papi."

"Not what would own you." She poked me again. "Your mami's a town man's whore and should've drowned you the day you were born."

She was only repeating village gossip, and that certainly wasn't the only time I've heard someone say that, but I think it was the first time someone ever told it to my face.

I punched her, and she ran off screaming, her eye turning a nasty shade of purple under her mud-dark skin.

That was the end of our sort-of friendship.

* * *

The slave girl comes into the room sometime in the late afternoon with a steaming bowl in one hand and a bundle of clothing in the other. I stand up as she comes in and wipe the tears and snot off my face as best and fast as I can. "Hi," I say. My voice scratches my throat.

"Evening prayer will begin shortly, miss," she says. "I brought you some supper and clothing." She puts the bundle on the bed and offers me the bowl.

It's full of lumpy, tasteless porridge; I only get down a few bites before giving up and handing it back. "I'm not hungry, thank you."

The slave girl shakes out the bundle. It's a robe, made in the Sahnsor style—one long piece of cloth that wraps around the shoulders and over the arms, the ends dangling to the floor. The cloth isn't white, but pale yellow, like a goldjay chick. I rub it between my fingers. It's soft and…I don't know, fluffy? Maybe that's not the right word, but it's the best I can think of.

The slave girl sets it in my hands and steps back. This is going to be a problem: I don't know how to put on a robe, or how to move around in one. I tripped over my own skirt this morning.

Twice.

Well, it's not going to go on by itself. I swing the cloth over my shoulders and try to guess how they do it. Cross the chest. Over the arms. Pointy ends left to dangle by the feet.

The result leaves me looking like I got tangled up in a blanket.

I look over at the slave girl helplessly, and she looks away, but not before I catch an expression that might be a smile on her face. I tug at one sleeve, and the whole thing slumps off. I sit back on the bed and let my head fall into my hands. I will not cry again; tears don't do any good.

"Forgive me for speaking out of turn, miss, but are you all right?" the slave girl asks.

I drop my hands from over my face and nod.

She crosses the room, scoops the robe from the floor, and shakes it out again. "It'll fit better if you take off your old clothes. You won't need them here."

I run my fingers over the bottom edge of my tunic—my nice one, with the decorative zigzag stitching on the hem. It's the only thing we have that belonged to Mami's mami because she died before they could forgive each other, and Aunt Fikie got everything else. "It's a stupid idea, dressing me like a Sahnsor," I say, more than a little grumpily.

"Please, miss," the slave girl says. "Evening prayer begins at sunset, and they won't want to see you in your old clothes."

"Well, what would they do about it, kill me?" But I slide out of my skirt and tunic and stand up again, trying to pay attention to how she wraps the robe: under the arms, cross over the chest, around the neck, several loops around the arms. There's a few tiny buttons on the sleeves I hadn't noticed before; she buttons them, then gathers my own clothes and steps back.

I look down at myself. Robed like a Sahnsor next to a girl who's tagged like chattel. Eris forgive me, but there's something very wrong about that.

"Thanks," I whisper.

She nods once, then turns to the door. She looks back at me when I don't follow. "This way, miss," she says.

There's nothing for it, so I go with her out into the hallway.

Walking in the robe turns out to be a challenge I'm not prepared for. I was thinking that it can't be too hard, because the Sahnsor are always so disturbingly graceful, moving like they have wings on their feet, and a lot of them are so old that a breeze could break them in two.

But that was before I tried moving while swabbed in one long, heavy piece of fabric.

The robe is anything but easy to walk in. The way it's wrapped around me leaves very little room for my legs to move, and the dangling ends of the sleeves are so long that I keep nearly stepping on them. I try to remember how the elders do it—how Sahnsor Ti'ath did it when he almost-ran down the hallway away from me—and try to make my body take that form. Head up. Shoulders kind of scrunched back. Arms bent at the elbows, and feet gliding rather than stepping.

I feel ridiculous, but at least I'm not stepping on the robe so much. Maybe, with a little practice, I could make this look as natural as the Sahnsor do.

Probably not. Ten days isn't long enough for someone like me to break a habit of clumsiness.

The slave girl leads me down several hallways, all identical to each other—white and door-lined, lit by round ceiling holes and white smokeless torches. "The person who designed this place didn't have a lot of imagination," I say, out loud only because there's someone else there to hear it, but I'm not surprised when the slave girl doesn't answer.

Eventually, we come to a large set of doors, and the girl opens them. The sight of the room on the other side takes my breath away.

It's made entirely of glass: ceiling, pillars, all five walls. Even the floor is glass, etched with pictures that have been so worn with time that it's no longer clear what they're supposed to be. The suns are setting, their bottom edges just touching the band of ragged hills on the southern horizon, and the light from them throws specks of red and gold dancing around the hall. I reach out toward one near the door and smile as it shimmers against the light skin on my palm.

I'm holding a rainbow.

The doors open again, and a priest in a formal green tunic comes in, trickling green-hemmed Sahnsor and a few wives in his wake. He walks around the room, filling it with the heavy, cloying scent of burning incense. The full court, elders and green-hems and wives and all, comes in in groups of four or five, and they arrange themselves in the room in such a way as to make it look practiced, elders in the front of the room, others in the middle, wives and slaves in the back near me and my slave girl.

At home, daily prayers are simple: Mami and I draw the line down our faces with the ashes of our burning-out fire, fold ourselves toward the suns, and say our prayers. No fuss, no bother.

Not so with the Sahnsor; I have the feeling that everything in the palace is a ritual. The priest holds up his hands—everyone kneels and bows to the setting suns. The priest clicks a few times—everyone clicks back for a lot longer. The priest lifts one of the sticks of incense toward the ceiling—everyone stands and shallow-bows to the northern horizon. I try to follow their lead with the kneeling and standing and bowing, and I do it okay—at least good enough not to get myself noticed—but the call-and-response part, I know right away I'll never be able to do.

At one point just before the suns finish setting, I catch Sahnsor Tí'ath looking at me. I smile faintly at him, and he smiles faintly back, then turns his attention back to the priest before someone notices.

Prayers last until the last bit of light is fading into a non-color along the edge of the sky. The slave girl returns me to my room. "Will there be anything else, miss?" she asks.

I sit down on the bed and stare out to the garden. The sky's dark, the moon shining soft silver-white on the walls, and, for the first time since setting foot in the palace, I'm able to see without squinting. "No, thank you," I say to the slave girl.

"I'll be back at dawn for morning prayers, miss." She leaves. The lock clicks shut.

It takes a long time for me to fall asleep.

* * *

I wake up in grayish darkness and for one glorious moment think that I'm at home and the fire's gone out. I get up to relight it when I feel the slippery cold stones beneath my bare feet and remember that I'm not at home. That I'm in the white stone palace, locked inside a room bigger than five homes, ten—nine—days from the sacrifice.

I sit down and close my eyes. The porridge I ate last evening is threatening to make a second appearance, but I clench my teeth together and swallow hard a few times. It didn't taste good going down; I don't want to taste it coming up.

Then there's the sound of something scraping at my door. I stand up again, straighten my robe, which is all tangled and messy from turning over, and go to the door.

"Hello?" I say.

More scraping. It seems to be coming from the lock. It fumbles and jiggles, definitely not a key—more like a knife or a hairpin.

"Hello?" I say again, a little louder than before.

A quiet _click_, an almost-inaudible whispered laugh, and the door unlatches. I grab it and pull it open.

The hallway is dim, now that the only light in it is from those smokeless white torch fires. It strikes me as somewhat arrogant, the fact that, even with no one around to need the light or the heat, the Sahnsor keep their hallway torches burning. But by the light, I can see a silhouette of someone getting to his feet as though he'd just been kneeling at my door.

"Who's there?" I demand, still careful to whisper.

"Did I wake you?"

The accent is Sahnsor. I squint into the darkness and am just able to make out a flash of graying-gold hair.


	5. Chapter 5

Sahnsor Tí'ath twirls a tiny silver knife between his fingers like a magician performing a trick, then slides it back into a fold in his robe. "Lock picking is a good skill to have," he says with the first bit of a grin in his voice. "You never know when you'll need to get through a locked door."

I just stare at him.

The silence stretches out between us, and his grin slides away. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," he says when the silence finally becomes unbearable. "I thought that…maybe…." He trails off, looks at me, and shakes his head. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have woken you. I'm sorry." And he turns to go.

"Wait."

I hear the word, a whisper sharp enough to be a shout, with my ears before I realize that it's my own voice saying it. Sahnsor Tí'ath spins back around, quickly, like he's surprised to be getting the reaction he was hoping for.

I bite my lip and look away—not at anything in particular, just away—and struggle to swallow a fresh batch of tears. This is insane: this Sahnsor can't be talking to me, and the high priest was only pretending to read my name in the town square, and I'm going to die, and this Sahnsor can't be talking to me!

"Kalima?"

I don't look at him. "What are you doing here?"

A pause. When he does answer, his voice is gentle, but there's an edge of something deeper and more painful in it, too, and I feel bad for how nasty I sounded. "I just…wanted to make sure you're all right."

He's mad. He's off his head in the worst possible way.

My voice softens a little. "I'm all right. Thank you."

"You don't need anything? Food, or water, or…"

"A way out of here," I mutter beneath his words, my eyes on the floor.

I thought saying it under my breath, quieter than a whisper, would keep him from hearing it. It's useless to think maybe this crazy man might help me get out of the palace. But he suddenly goes quiet.

I look up, and he's looking at me with so much pain on his face, it hurts just seeing it. Once, I helped Mami take care of a boy who slipped on the riverbank and broke his leg so that the bone poked out through his skin, and that's the first thought I have seeing the expression on Sahnsor Tí'ath's face now. My first instinct is to reach out and touch him, to do my limited best to ease that pain, and my hand is halfway across the space between us before I remember and pull it back. "Sir?" I say instead, remembering that's what the slave girl called him.

"I'm sorry, Kalima," he whispers, shaking his head, his eyes squeezing shut. "I'm so sorry."

I frown. "For what?"

He huffs out a breath, opens his eyes, and smiles bitterly. "I'm afraid my butter knife is no match for the lock on the palace gate."

Well, it's not like I deserve the truth from a Sahnsor anyway, especially considering I _am_ being awful nosy, questioning him and all.

"I'm sorry, sir—"

He winces like the words sting. "Please don't, don't apologize to me. Not ever. You've done nothing wrong."

I can think of a few white-robed elders who might disagree, but I get the idea that arguing with him about crimes and sins would be mostly a waste of breath, so I don't try. My fingers pick at the tiny buttons on the sleeve of the robe. "There is one thing," I say when the silence again becomes unbearable.

"Name it."

"At home, we use the river to…" I hesitate, face hot, searching for a not-crude way of putting it. "Relieve ourselves, and I was wondering…?"

"Of course," he says when the end of my question splutters into quiet. "There should be a chamber pot under the table by your bed."

"A pot?" I repeat. My nose wrinkles with the thought. "Is that…sanitary?"

He smiles, the most proper smile I've seen on him; even with just the torches for light, I can see it spread across his face, crinkling his eyes and flashing his teeth, and I find myself smiling back without deciding to. "Maybe not," he says. "But since the river doesn't run through the palace, there are no other options."

(I find it just where he said it would be, a round clay pot with a narrow neck and wide mouth, like the vases sold in town for holding flowers, and I sit looking at it for a while, trying to get over the disgusted feeling I have when I think about peeing into it. Eventually, of course, the pain in my middle gets so that I can no longer sit and think about it, and I have to just _do_ it. Still, with all the luxury of the white stone palace, all the grandness of the Sahnsor, you'd think they'd come up with a better way to deal with such a basic need.)

* * *

Sahnsor Tí'ath doesn't stay long; the suns come up fast during the in-between days, and the slave girl did say that morning prayers begin at dawn.

"What would they do if they found you here?" I wonder, raising my voice a little to be heard through the door and over the scraping of his little knife as he relocks my door.

The scraping pauses. "I don't know," he says.

"Execute us?"

"I doubt it."

"Why?" I frown, confused and curious. So far, he's been good at making those two. "Isn't that what they do to Sahnsor and Anami who talk to each other?"

The scraping starts up again and is the only sound in the room for the length of several breaths. When he does finally answer, his voice is strained. "Normally, yes. But, if they executed you, they'd lose their sacrifice, and if they executed me…well, they're not capable of that much mercy."

Very, very good.

* * *

The slave girl comes in before the first crack of sunrise with a tray in her hands. More porridge, and another pot of that awful mud-grass-and-silt tea. Is this all they eat in the palace? Surely they must grow vegetables, or raise duks, or something. Even Mami and I always had flour and oil for bread.

Still, I haven't really eaten in almost two days, and I down the entire bowl of porridge almost too fast to taste it. The slave girl pours a cup of the tea and offers it to me. I take it, sniff it—it still smells gross. "What is this, anyway?" I ask.

"Sum'a, miss," she says. Her lips smack together over the middle sound. "It will cleanse you of impurity."

Ah, yes, because cleansing myself of impurity is the one thing I've been desperate to do.

She putters around the room for a few minutes, straightening up the bed and untangling my robe from the mess my restless night twisted it into.

I miss my normal clothes.

Then, once everything—including me—looks neat again, and with the suns on their way up, we go to morning prayers, which is really just evening prayers, only earlier and with the kneel-bow facing north and the standing-bow to the south.

When we get back to the room, the slave girl collects the dishes and starts toward the door, but I stop her before she goes out. "What's your name?" I ask.

She pauses at the door but doesn't turn.

"If you're going to be around all the time, I'd like to know."

She shakes her head.

"Here, I'll go first. I'm Kalima." I take a few steps toward her and hold out my right hand, inviting her to clasp my wrist and be properly introduced.

She turns slowly, her eyes on the floor, but I'm sure that's a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "I'm Vî'sid." She readjusts her grip on the tray and takes my hand briefly. "Sixth daughter of Elder Mí'kak, twelfth seat."

My hand jerks back, smacks into the pot of sum'a, and knocks it to the floor. It shatters, leaking cold green-tinted liquid onto the marble. The slave girl—Vî'sid—and I drop to our knees at the same time. "I'm sorry," I say. "I'm such a clumsy—"

She puts the tray on the floor and rests a hand on my arm. "It's all right, miss." She begins to pick up the broken pieces of pot.

"You…" My mind is having trouble making sense of her words. "You're a Sahnsor?"

"Yes, miss."

"The daughter of an elder?"

"Yes, miss."

"But, you're a _slave_?"

"Yes, miss."

She says it so casually—_yes, miss,_ like I'm asking her if the suns set at night. Like the idea of her being a Sahnsor isn't worth getting upset about. I rock back on my heels and look at her, hard. "How can you be a slave if you're the daughter of an elder?"

"We all are, miss, until we're old enough to bear sons. Then, if we've served well and are pleasing to look at, we may be chosen as wives."

"We?" I repeat. There's a strange taste in my mouth, like I accidently swallowed mud.

"The daughters, miss." She glances at me, her forehead wrinkling. "Are you all right?"

How do you explain to someone about how their to-be-expected is one of the most unbelievable ideas you've ever heard? "I'm fine. Thank you…Viisid." I try to pronounce it right, with the tongue-click and all, but can't.

She finishes picking up the pot and starts to the door, the tray in her hands, then pauses before opening it and glances back at me, and this time she actually meets my eyes. Her eyes are gray, a rich smokey gray like a thick cloud cover. "Thank you."

"For what?"

She smiles, but her words are hesitant, like she isn't sure she should be saying anything at all but can't help herself. "For asking my name. I can't remember the last time someone did that."

"Well, I couldn't keep calling you 'the slave girl,' could I?"

Her smile disappears, replaced by a frown that pulls her eyebrows tight over her eyes, but I don't even have time to wonder how I've offended her before she asks, "Why not?" and it's surprise, not hurt, in her voice.

I stand up. "Because we're friends."

She smiles again, brighter than before, then turns and leaves, locking the door behind her.

* * *

It is a long, dull morning. Yesterday, when I first set foot in the palace, I would've never thought, with so much strangeness around me and so little time left to me, I could get so quickly bored. But fear and strangeness are too exhausting to keep up for very long, and by midmorning, they've leeched away into a vague do-nothingness that is unfamiliar and unpleasant. I sit on the bed. I wipe up the spilled sum'a with one of the small decorative pillows on the bed, staining it a sickly shade of green. I stare out the glass wall at the fountain and the liali, waiting for something to happen, but nothing does.

In town, people will be celebrating. The days between the drawing and the sacrifice are a holiday, a festival, when no one is allowed to buy or sell, so all the food and drinks are free. Sometimes, we take advantage of this and stuff ourselves with the leftover food people throw out, and sometimes a town man so drunk he can't tell up from down will toss an Anami child a coin or two, but mostly, we keep out of the town during the holidays.

Kindness from a drunk town man is a lot less common than brutality. More than once, Mami's seen to someone who was beaten by a drunk town man or two.

"Why do they do that?" I asked her once, watching her mop blood off one boy's face, from under his nose and around his eyes. He wasn't very much older than me—nine turns at the time—and two men with sticks had taken to beating him not far from the edge of town.

Mami was concentrating on the boy, being careful not to jostle his broken nose, so it took her a minute to answer me, and, when she did, her voice was short. Impatient. "Because that's what town men do," she said.

"Did my papi?"

Mami sighed, a long and weary sound, her usual response to my my-papi questions. "No," she said. "I never knew him to be cruel."

I thought about this. Then: "Did you love him?"

"Kalima." Her voice got very stiff, coming out through her teeth. Her annoyed voice. "I'm trying to take care of this boy. Can it wait?"

It waited nearly a full turn. On the night before my first drawing, as I lay awake on my cot, Mami came over and sat down beside me, putting one hand on the back of my head and pulling her fingers through the little braids she'd spent much of the day helping me wash and rebraid. "Yes," she whispered into the darkness—for once answering a question I didn't think I'd asked. "I did love your papi. I loved him so much that even now, after so long, it hurts to think about him."

I propped myself up onto one elbow. "Who was he?"

I thought for a moment Mami would say; she opened her mouth and took a breath like she was going to answer, but then blew it out and shook her head. "It doesn't matter. He left, and he's not coming back."

It was the last thing she ever said about him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's Note: Thanks to everyone who has been reading and commenting!**

* * *

Part Two

_A Family:_  
_Sixteen Turns Ago_

She wrote him a note, her handwriting wobbly and her spelling unsure, and hid it under a rock at their usual meeting place, but she didn't know when, or if, he'd read it—and, as day after day passed without an answer, she began to lose hope.

She tried to convince herself that maybe it was for the best, that they'd all be better off if he never found out.

It didn't work.

So, when one night a knock on her door startled her awake, and she stumbled up to open it and saw him standing there, breathing hard like he ran the whole way, it took all her will to keep herself from bursting into tears. "You came," she whispered, her voice tripping over the clog in her throat, and stepped to one side so he could enter.

"Of course." He slid into the room and closed the door behind him. "I'm sorry it took me so long—I wanted to run here the moment I got your message, but…." His eyes flashed around the room, as though he expected someone to jump out at them from the corner. "Every time I thought, maybe now, someone stopped me, and it drove me mad, that you'd think I wasn't coming, that I didn't want—"

She pressed her fingers to his lips. "Shh, shh. It's all right, you're here now."

He held her fingers there for a moment and looked at her with an expression she had never seen him wear, so fearful that her skin prickled like they was being watched. "I was followed," he admitted after a moment, his voice breath-quiet.

"Followed?"

"Just by a slave." She could see him shaking off the moment, reaching for a smile. "It's nothing to worry about; I sent her back before even reaching the gate." His eyes went around the room again, still anxiously, but this time with purpose, looking for something. "May I…may I see her?"

She smiled and turned her hand around to hold his, then tugged him away from the door and into the far corner of the room. Together, they crouched down beside the cradle pushed against the mud-brick wall and looked down at the pile of mismatched bits of cloth that made up the bed. Snug under a thin blue blanket was the baby, her brown head, with its shock of dark hair, the only part visible.

"Oh," he sighed. His free hand lifted above the cradle as though he might touch the baby's downy hair, but then hovered a hand's-breadth above the blanket. His fingers trembled.

She squeezed his hand, and he looked over at her. If she thought he looked afraid before, it was nothing compared to the terror on his face now, the shallow, irregular hitch of his breathing and the way all the color seemed to be draining from his face. She couldn't help it: she laughed. "You all right?"

He let out a gusty breath and nodded.

"Then…." She tilted her head at his still-hovering hand.

He turned his attention back to the cradle and, with aching slowness, lowered his hand and stroked her forehead with feather-light fingertips. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper, his eyes never leaving the baby. "What's her name?"

"Kalima."

"Kalima," he repeated. Then again, hardly aloud: "Kalima."

The baby yawned a huge, toothless yawn, opened her eyes, and stared up at him.

"Oxx's demons."

She smiled against his shoulder. "She has your eyes." And, for the first time in days, she forgot to worry about what that might mean for all of their futures and let herself be happy. She loved them both so much it hurt.

His hand tightened around hers. Even without concentrating, she could sense the whirl of feelings all vying for expression inside him: fear and uncertainty and wonder. And, underneath it all, a perfect happiness so new and delicate that it didn't dare jostle around with the others for fear of being smashed.

"Do you think…?" He hesitated, swallowed, tried again. "Could I…maybe…?"

He didn't finish, but he didn't need to. She dropped his hand, scooped the baby up from her cradle, and gently laid her in the crook of his arm.

"Oh," he whispered again, and, before she could finish pulling her hands out from beneath the baby's head, that perfect happiness exploded out of him like the second sun from behind the horizon, so brilliant that even the baby looked up at him and smiled wide enough to press dimples into her fat cheeks.

"Kalima," he said through a rush of tears. "Kalima." Like her name was the only word he'd ever say again.

She reached out with both hands and brushed the tears off his cheeks. "She's already had a bath today."

He laughed, but the tears didn't slow. "I'm fine, just…"

She pressed her lips to his forehead and lingered there, her next words spoken against his skin. "I know."

"Henna, she's…I knew she'd be beautiful, but I…she's…"

It was strange to see him run out of words so completely—that was something she'd always thought his good education prevented. She smiled and finished the thought for him. "She's ours."

He tore his eyes off the baby long enough to smile at her. "Ours."

* * *

They spent the rest of the night like that, sitting on the floor, the baby asleep in his arms. She would've been content to stay that way forever, but the rising of the first sun interrupted them—and the sun brought back fear.

He looked up as the first beam of sunlight cut through the room and hissed a string of profanities under his breath, then glanced down at the baby, who had been asleep for some time. "Sorry," he said, with a rueful smile that quickly disappeared. He stood and looked up at the sun again. "I have to go."

She closed her eyes against the desire to ask him to stay, just forget everything and stay with her. But she couldn't, because she knew he would, and that would land them all in more trouble than she could imagine. So, instead, she stood up and held her arms out for the baby.

He gave her up like he was cutting off his own arm but didn't take his eyes off the baby's sleeping face for another long moment. He bent down and touched his lips to the puff of dark downy hair, and she could hear him whisper in the tiny ear: "Your papi loves you, little one."

She blinked quickly until the tears were no longer in danger of falling.

He straightened and passed an anxious glance over her face. "I interrupted your sleep."

She shook her head, dismissing the thought. "I haven't been sleeping much anyway."

He glanced toward the door, then spoke in a rush. "I'll come to you from now on, whenever I can."

She nodded.

"Soon. Often." Then, just as she was deciding that he wasn't going to, he kissed her. "Don't worry, Henna," he whispered before pulling away. "I won't let anything happen to you. To either of you. I swear it."


	7. Chapter 7

Vî'sid interrupts my dozing sometime in the afternoon with a summons from the court. She has to help me straighten my robe, which has somehow gotten into a tangle again, even though I've done nothing but sit on my bed.

She leads me out to the garden, taking a much longer route to get there than I remember from yesterday. The suns are straight overhead, throwing brilliant light and vivid shadows across the ground.

It is good to be outside.

Not exactly outside, of course; there's still the bright white and unclimbably-high walls surrounding me, and the huge glass dome that turns the suns' heat into steaming fog. But it's as close as I'll get until they take me to the temple at the town square, and I'm not especially looking forward to that trip.

And, even if it is still closed inside the palace, the garden is lovely—the steamy heat beneath the glass dome makes the scent of liali almost overwhelming, and I close my eyes and breathe it in. Liali grow wild on the riverbanks, in tangles so numerous they're practically a weed. The wild liali are scrawny and dull compared to these huge, flaming-orange flowers, but their scent's the same spicy-sweet flavor as I know.

It's like the liali are a touch of home. An unexpected comfort in this strange, colorless palace.

The entire court, including the wives, mill around the garden, clicking and laughing to each other. Even their laughs have a strange insecty quality to them, like they way they click over their words even when they speak my language. Like even their laughs have accents.

My eyes, of their own free will, find Sahnsor Tí'ath in the crowd, and he must notice me, because he smiles the tiniest smile, barely more than a twitch of the lips—something that could be mistaken for anything else, or nothing at all. But I'm sure it's meant as a smile, and for me; I don't think Sahnsor Tí'ath is the kind of person who gives out accidental smiles. I smile back, bigger than I mean to, but no one has a chance to notice, because that's the moment one of the elders steps forward and makes an attention-catching sweep with his hand, and everyone turns to look at him.

He's the same elder who addressed everyone at the drawing, the one who I think might be the second seat, since the elder in the first seat is too decrepit to do anything but hobble and stare. He's gray-haired and fat, but he holds himself with the knowledge of how important he is and speaks with confidence and a lot of authoritative hand gestures.

The food starts coming out during the elder's speech, carried by slaves and laid out on tables around the fountain—roasted duk glistening with fat, boiled clams as big as my fist, breads still steaming from the oven, and bowls of sugared liali petals, fruits and nuts and beans, juices and teas and large pots of mulled bareel wine…. My stomach rumbles. I want to dive for the nearest table and stuff myself full of everything, but no one is moving, so I take a few breaths, smell the delicious smells steaming into the air, and tell myself to be patient.

Eventually, the elder stops clicking and makes an attention-tugging gesture toward the food, and the other elders sweep at the tables. After what must be the appropriate amount of time, the rest of the court joins them. I take a step toward the nearest table that isn't completely blocked by Sahnsor, keen for some of that still-warm bread, but Vî'sid puts a hand on my arm and stops me.

"Can't I…?"

She shakes her head. "I'm sorry, miss."

"But—"

"If you're hungry, I can bring you some porridge." She makes the offer brightly, like she thinks she said exactly what I hoped she would.

"Porridge." I take one slow, longing look at the hot breads, the roast duk and boiled clams and sugared liali, and sigh. "Thank you."

She nods and turns away from the tables. "Wait here," she says over her shoulder as she hurries toward the nearest hallway into the palace.

* * *

I've never seen anything like the court feasting. Vî'sid leaves and comes back with the tray, and its usual offerings, and I eat the porridge slowly, one clump at a time, pretending that each bite is a different meat or bread or fruit, and gag down two mouthfuls of sum'a, and then, as space around the fountain opens up, go over and sit on the knee-high wall with my chin in my hands and watch a bee buzz over the liali for a long time—and still the feast goes on, tray after tray of food coming out to replace the half-empty dishes already on the tables.

The others, the wives and brothers and sons who aren't elders, stop after a while, apparently satisfied with their several heaping servings. But the elders show no signs of stopping, even now; every time they eat everything they're holding, they dip back into the food for more, and more, and still more, until finally they're all drooping into chairs the slaves had been sent to get with their heads limp on their necks, still reaching into the bowls of sugared liali and forcing their mouths to keep chewing.

I go back to watching the bee.

"Have they started you on their cleansing diet already?"

The quiet voice from beside me makes me jump. Sahnsor Tí'ath is standing two steps to my left, his eyes fixed on the court in a way that suggests he's near me only by coincidence, but the question was definitely his.

I look again at the bee, which has left the liali and is now buzzing through the white many-petaled blossoms on one of the geena trees, and nod.

He takes a small sideways step toward me and sits down on the fountain wall, too. "I thought so. Here." He holds out his hand; in it is a large stick of puffy bread with cheese baked right into the crust.

I grab the bread—realizing a moment too late that my eagerness probably looks beyond rude—hold it to my nose, and breathe in. "Mmm. Thank you," I sigh and tear into it with my teeth. The crust is flaky, and the cheese melts in my mouth. The inside is different from any puffy bread I've had before, savory rather than sweet, full of strong, unfamiliar herbs perfectly suited to the mild cheese in the crust. Delicious.

I'm three bites in before the strangeness of the gesture hits me. For this one little kindness, Sahnsor Tí'ath must've seen me looking at the court's feast, understood the longing, waited for the elders to be too stuffed to notice and for Vî'sid to leave for some of her other chores—it all suddenly feels so…intentional.

I lower the bread from my mouth and glance over at him to catch him looking at me. "And what are you about?" I ask.

His eyebrows come together in a frown. "I'm sorry?"

"Do you make it a habit of being kind to Anami sacrifices?"

He smiles uncomfortably. "Not enough to call it a habit."

"So, why me?"

He looks away; his voice goes soft. "Does it matter?"

I look away, too, back to the elders slumping in their chairs. His redhead friend from the drawing is talking animatedly to the elder who made the speech. They both turn and look at me.

Goosebumps skitter across my arms, and I feel the half-eaten bread in my hand, and the presence of the Sahnsor who gave it to me, like red-hot coals—both punishable offenses for sure, and this elder doesn't strike me as the kind of man who'd mind a flogging or two. He'd probably enjoy the spectacle.

Which is why it surprises me when he shakes his head and turns back to his plate, and, when the redhead starts to step toward me anyway, the elder grabs his arm with a visibly-restraining grip and pushes him off in another direction.

I glance sideways at Sahnsor Tí'ath, who doesn't appear to have noticed them. Maybe that shouldn't surprise me; it lasted barely a few seconds, and maybe it was nothing worth noticing. I couldn't hear them, and I wouldn't've understood them if I had—they could've been talking about something totally unrelated, and it was just coincidence that they looked in my direction.

Still, suspicion tickles me like a duk feather against my skin. I try to keep it from bleeding into my voice. "Well, yes," I say in answer to his question. "You're next in line for the second seat. You shouldn't know I exist except because I'm the honored child chosen to cleanse you of your sins."

He's shaking his head almost before I finish. "I'm not."

"Not what?"

"Next in line for the second seat."

This surprises some of the venom out of my voice. "No? But you said your papi was…." I dribble off. He did say he was the oldest son of the elder in the second seat—and something about a broken cup—when he was introducing himself. I remember it, because that was when the fact he was talking to me changed from nonsense to madness.

"Oh, he is. That's him." Sahnsor Tí'ath nods at the elder and confirms for me who he is. "It doesn't matter; I was stripped of that privilege"—he says the word like he might spit it—"a long time ago."

I frown. That's not something I knew could be done; I thought being an elder was an Eris-given right to the first-born son of an elder. "For what?"

He shakes his head, dismissing the question. "A…crime."

"_You_ committed a crime?"

He smiles at the shock in my voice, but I can't help it—a crime bad enough to strip him of his divine right to the elderhood would have to be something a lot worse than having contact with an Anami, and that's as bad a crime as I know. Though maybe that's why he doesn't think talking to me is the most horrible thing he could possibly do, because he's already done something much worse.

"What did you do, eat somebody?" I ask, grinning.

He breathes out in what might be the beginning of a silent laugh. "No. I was just…young and stupid," he says.

I look back out toward the flowers, but my bee is gone, so I watch the nearest cluster of Sahnsor click at each other. "What _did_ you do?" I ask again after a minute, seriously this time.

He breathes in and out, both loudly enough to hear. "It doesn't matter," he says, and I'm startled by the frustration in his voice. He stands up and walks away from me in long, angry strides.

* * *

**Author's Note: I am officially on the hunt for a proper title for this story. PM me if you have any ideas; I would appreciate it immensely!**


	8. Chapter 8

Tonight, there is no sleeping: I lay, restless and wide-awake, on the bed for a long time, and, when the quiet knock breaks the room's silence maybe an hour before dawn, I'm immediately on my feet and at the door. "Hello?" I whisper—even though there's only one person it could be, I still feel like I need to ask.

"Hello," Sahnsor Tí'ath whispers back, and something scrapes against the lock. "Should I…?"

"Please."

It's a little frightening how quickly I've begun to get over the strangeness of thinking of a Sahnsor as a friend, but something about him seems…comfortable. Almost _familiar_. It's difficult to explain, even to myself, why I trust him—maybe because he's been so kind, and because kindness is the last thing I expected to find inside the palace, amongst the Sahnsor. Or maybe it's something about him, about the way he looks at me like he knows me, or at least like he wants to, and that's something no one but Mami has ever wanted of me.

Whatever the reason, there it is. I've known him two days, and already I trust him almost like I trust Mami.

Well. His madness is contagious.

Sahnsor Ti'ath's little knife jiggles around for a minute, then the lock clicks, and the door opens a finger-width. I smile as I open it wider. "Would you teach me how to do that sometime?"

He smiles, too, and stands up. "Whenever you want. Now, if you like."

"Not right now. Just…sometime."

He doesn't say anything about how I might not have a sometime left, and I'm grateful for that. Instead, he says, "Well, lesson one: picking locks is only useful if you use it to get out of places you don't want to be locked in," and steps aside, sweeping his hand out toward the hallway.

Maybe that's why I trust him: he has no regard for their rules.

* * *

We go to the garden. "I wish I could get you out of here," he says. "I'm so sorry that I can't."

I shake my head, rattling away the disappointment, and sit down on the fountain wall. "It's a very pretty place. If liali along the river grew this big and pretty, Mami would probably stop making me pull it up all the time."

"It's…just you and your mami?" he asks, watching the fountain where the falling drops hit the pool underneath.

"Yeah. It always has been."

"Your papi?"

"Abandoned us a long time ago."

He sits down beside me, lays his hands flat on the top of the fountain wall, and leans into his arms. "I'm sorry," he says.

I shrug. "I never knew him. He was a town man."

"Your mami told you that?"

"Well, what else could he be? Look at me. He wasn't Anami."

"Your eyes are…unusual. Very striking."

My face heats up, and embarrassment makes my voice come out sarcastic. "Thanks."

"No, I mean it. You're…" He hesitates, smiles at me in that full sort of way, like everything might come spilling out of him if he's not careful, then heaves a breath and stares at the flowers. "So, after your papi…abandoned…" he stumbles over the word, "you, there must've been someone else?"

"Like, another man?" I snort at the suggestion. "Of course not."

He looks at me again, his eyebrows pulling together. "Why 'of course not'? Any woman able to bring up a child on her own must be worth someone's notice."

"She had a fling with a town man," I say, a little baffled by the idea that I have to explain at all, "and she didn't drop me in the river when I was born—the most we can ever expect is to be left alone, and we are, mostly, except when someone's hurt or sick. Mami's the best at easing," I add at his lifted eyebrow. "You could be dying of fever, and she puts one hand on you, and you feel as cool and fresh as a spring morning."

Sahnsor Tí'ath smiles at that, disbelieving, I think. "That's right. You Anami have magical power to take away pain."

"Well, I don't know that it's magic."

"Then what is it?"

"A skill. And a talent. You have to be born with it, a little, but mostly it's just endless practicing."

"Can you?"

I make a face. "Sometimes. Mami's had me practicing since I was five, but by now, I think it's pretty clear that I didn't get her talent."

For a while, the only sound is the tinkle of water from the fountain. The air is hot and heavy, sticking in my throat like a lump of porridge, and, when I do speak again, the words feel clumsy. "I still don't get it, why you even care."

He shakes his head and leans harder against his arms.

I watch him; the hunch in his shoulders reminds me of the way Mami looked the morning of the drawing as she prayed in the ashes of our fire pit, and maybe there's nothing I can do about it, but that's a terrible reason not to try. My fingers are laced together and pinned between my knees, but I pull one hand free and reach across the couple hand-breadth's of space that separate us.

My hand freezes a few inches above his. I can't. He's a Sahnsor. Even kind—even mad—he's still a Sahnsor. Absolutely forbidden. Do not touch.

I grit my teeth and drop my hand down on his almost like it's a bug I'm trying to crush.

He flinches, probably surprised by the way I smack him, but otherwise doesn't pull away, doesn't move at all, so I take a better grip on his hand, close my eyes, and concentrate…

His pain is astonishing, on the surface as fierce and white as the palace in the light of the two suns, and underneath ragged and festering. A brilliant new wound on top of an old unhealed one. I gasp, my eyes snapping open, and my sense of it disappears as quickly as it came.

Never in my life have I felt anything like it, so hot and huge I don't even know where to start.

Sahnsor Tí'ath still hasn't moved—I'm not even sure he's breathing. "I'm sorry," I say and begin guiltily to pull away. "I can't—"

His hand turns over and catches mine faster than I can finish pulling it back, and this shocks the rest of my apology right out of my head. His hand is large and warm and dry, the palm rough—not at all what I'd expect, even if I ever thought to expect something.

"What have I said about apologizing to me?" he asks after a moment. The words would be scolding but that he speaks them so quietly, barely above a breath.

"You said don't."

"I mean it. Don't ever apologize to me. You're not the one who—" He cuts himself off before he can finish and releases my hand. I pull it back and bury it again into a fold of robe between my knees to hide the way it's shaking.

* * *

We're both silent for a while; I concentrate hard on the holes my big toes are digging in the soft warm dirt along the edge of the fountain wall, but finally I can't help it any longer. "What happened to you?" I ask, keeping my eyes on my feet.

He doesn't answer right away, and, when he does, his voice is still breath-quiet. "It doesn't matter."

I look up. "But it does. I've seen people with bones sticking out through their skin and mamis whose children are starving to death, but I've never seen anything like…like _that_."

A heartbeat of silence, and I think that maybe he might answer the question, but then he just smiles a little and says, "You amaze me, Kalima, the way you seem not to hate me."

I blink. Hate him? "You've been very kind to me, kinder than I thought Sahnsor could be."

He exhales through his nose like a snort, and I realize that, coming from me, that probably doesn't sound the way I meant it. "I mean," I correct myself quickly, "kinder to me than anyone has ever been, and with a lot less reason, considering that you're a Sahnsor, and being kind to me is a crime and a sin."

"Sin," he repeats slowly, and there's an edge to his voice that I haven't heard before, like the words have been rotting inside him for a long time and they taste bad coming out. "What good is a god who says being kind to someone is a sin?"

The question hangs in the air, interrupted only by the faint tinkling of the fountain, for the space of several breaths. My mouth has gone dry, and that makes it hard to get the words out. "Are you…questioning Eris?"

He meets my eyes and answers bluntly, without remorse. "Maybe it's time someone does."

"Why? It won't do any good."

"You don't know that." His voice is excited. Urgent. "Just think of it, Kalima, what the world could be like if the elders didn't rule it. No sacrifice. No—" He shoves himself upright and takes a few long, quick strides toward the garden wall like his thoughts are too big, too agitating, to think about sitting still.

I look down at my toes still digging holes in the dirt, whispering in my head a prayer that Eris forgive him for his words.

That Eris forgive _me _for listening to them.

Sahnsor Tí'ath stops walking just short of the garden wall and stands there for a few heartbeats without moving, then, with his back still to me, says, "I'm sorry."

"It's all right," I say back.

He spins around. "No, it's not. It never has been, and it never will be, and they'll make sure I live with it for a good long time." His hand, balled into a fist, flies backward and smacks the garden wall with a dull, painful-sounding thud.

He really is stark raving mad.

I stand and take two cautious steps toward him. "My lord—"

"Tí'ath, please."

My face gets hot. "I can't."

"Please. I'm nobody's lord, and certainly not yours. Please."

"No, it's not that, it's just…I can't do the tongue thing."

And this answer is so ridiculous stuck here in the middle of such a heavy moment that both of us laugh, and I realize that this is the first time I've heard him laugh, that I almost thought he didn't know how to. "Just Tiath, then," he says. He has to work to keep the click out of the middle of his name when he says it like that, but it makes it pronounceable.

"Tiath," I repeat and smile a little.

He smiles back, then glances up at the glass dome. The darkness in the garden is getting tired and gray.

"Prayers will be starting soon," I say. I think I do an all right job of keeping my voice unmiserable. "I should be locked up before anyone notices."

"I'm sorry," he says.

"It's not your fault," I remind him.

"Isn't it?" He says the words almost too quietly to hear, like he's saying them to himself, then turns and leads me back to my room.

"Does it bother you, my visiting?" he asks just before shutting the door and starting to lock me back inside. "If it does, say so; I won't be offended."

"No," I say. "Actually, I'm grateful for it. I'd be all alone right now if it weren't for you." Eris forgive me, but it's true. My face heats up, but I bite my lip and don't take it back, and Tí'ath smiles.

"Goodnight, Kalima," he says.

"Goodnight, Tí'ath." I try it with the click and fail appallingly, but it urges a second, softer, laugh from him.


	9. Chapter 9

Somehow, I'm able to squeeze a few minutes of sleep in between getting back into my room and Vî'sid coming to fetch me for morning prayers. Those minutes are far from peaceful, though, tangled up in a dream of the high priest's ceremonial knife, a long silver blade with a pearl handle—not sturdy, but very sharp—waving over the high priest's head as he comes at me, and I'm running so that my muscles ache and my lungs burn, but I'm caught in river mud that's sucking at my feet, and the high priest and his wicked knife are on top of me, and he's pulling the knife down my arms, across my throat, and there's blood everywhere, and I'm trying to scream but no sound comes out….

But, when I wake up to Vî'sid's hand on my shoulder, I'm thinking of Tí'ath, of the expression on his face when he stood with his back against the garden wall and pounded it with one fist and said, _They'll make sure I live with it for a good long time._ So much hopelessness in those words.

He said something like that two nights ago, too, when I asked him what he thought the elders would do if they found us talking, and he thought probably not execute us—because "they're not capable of that much mercy."

And all that astonishing pain….

Whatever he did, whatever crime he committed, I can't believe it deserved so _much_ punishment.

Vî'sid keeps her hand on my shoulder until I pull my eyes all the way open and sit up. "Are you all right, miss?" she asks.

"Yeah." I run my hands over my eyes and tell myself to relax. "It was just a dream."

Just a dream, but only seven days from being reality….

I break the thought off before it can make me sick.

Vî'sid gives me the cup she brought with her and fills it with sum'a. "Drink it, miss," she says quietly. "It'll help."

I wrap my cold fingers around the cup and take a sip. It still tastes like mud-grass and silt, but the warmth of it going down my throat and into my stomach calms the worst of my trembling, and I drink almost the whole thing without another word.

"Is that better?"

I nod. "Thank you."

She gives me the usual bowl of mushy, tasteless porridge, which I also eat without complaint, too tired to taste it, then she helps me crawl out of bed and does her usual tidying-up of my robe and room.

"Vî'sid?" I desperately need to practice saying Sahnsor names—the click in the middle of hers makes me sound like I'm choking. Still, she turns and says, "Yes, miss?" as though she can't hear the way I mangle her name. "What would happen if I told you I didn't want to go to prayers?"

She stares at me blankly, as though this is the most unbelievable thing she could ever imagine anyone saying.

I sigh. That's what I thought. "Never mind, don't listen to me."

"I didn't want to go to prayers once." She says the words like they slip out despite herself, and she puts her fingers to her lips as if she wants to shove them back in, but they're already out.

"Why not?" I ask.

We start down the hall, and, for a few steps, she's quiet. "I was about twelve and was just starting to understand what my life was going to be: being the property of the elderhood until I'm old enough to bear children, and then, if I'm blessed, being the property of a husband so that I can have sons. I was angry, and I didn't want to worship a god who said that was how things had to be. I…" She hesitates, her cheeks turning red, then finishes in a whisper: "I lost my faith, miss."

"Completely?"

"Yes, miss."

I whistle, the sound going from high to low. I've never known anyone who lost their faith completely.

"Yes, miss. I was beaten when I said I wouldn't go to prayers."

"What happened?"

"I went for several turns only because I'd rather go than be beaten, and then, one morning, I found what I'd been missing." She stops walking; I can see the prayer-room doors, but I stop when she does. She looks at me, ignoring the sounds of voices beginning to catch up with us. "I found peace."

* * *

_Peace._

That word echoes through my head all during prayers, as I stand and kneel and bow with everyone else. I wish I'd been able to ask her where she found her peace and whether she thinks I could find it in the same place, but I don't think telling someone where to find peace is quite as simple as giving them directions to the best bareel bushes, the ones with enough berries to make battling with their spines worth the fight.

I miss home. I miss the sound of the river as it churns over rocks and the taste of a clam cooked right and lightly salted. I miss prayers that are quick and quiet. I even miss my chores: cutting and drying mud-grass to rethatch the roof, filtering and boiling drinking water, tending the fire, baking bread, hunting for other food among the various thorny plants that grow along the riverbank.

And I never thought there'd be a day when I'd miss doing chores.

Vî'sid returns me to my room after prayers, and I pace back and forth in front of the glass wall, my thoughts humming like a disturbed vasp nest: the faith of slaves and Sahnsor, the good of a god who says being kind to someone is a sin. And, below the other thoughts the way it has been since the drawing, the memory of the high priest reading my name off a blank piece of paper.

I press my palm against the glass. It's hard, and cold, and probably too thick even to shout through. How hard would I have to hit it in order to break it? Harder than my hands could hit anyway, at least if I wanted to keep my hands useful. My eyes flash around the room, looking for something that could break glass, but there's nothing in this room—just the bed and the little round table. Maybe the table…it's small, but it's made of marble, and probably too heavy to pick up, but maybe I could drag it and push it over, and then….

And then what? I'd be out of the room, but that would only get me into the garden, and that's no better than being locked in the room—maybe worse, because I'd be caught before I could break out of the garden, and the front door, lost somewhere in the maze of halls and shut tight with its stone-on-stone lock, is a no better option, even if I had Tí'ath helping me.

Which is information I got from him, but I don't think he was lying; if he had some idea for breaking out of the palace, I think he'd tell me.

Of course, for all I know, it could all be a lie. He could be working under the elders' strict instructions, playing at being kind just to keep an eye on me.

I hope that's not true. I shudder to imagine them finding out about things like what I told him about my papi, and Mami—and especially the moment I took his hand, and that he let me, and held my hand, too, and that it made me feel…fuller, somehow. Older. Completer.

I lean into the glass wall and watch the growing blue in the sky, another of my few remaining days exploding with brightness. "The suns set so we can sleep," Mami said once when I was young and first trying to figure out the world. "And they come up so plants can grow and people can work and play and live. You see? There are no accidents—everything that happens happens for a reason."

_Is it true?_ I want to ask her now. _Do you still believe that?_

And I know it's just my imagination, but I can almost hear her answering back: "Yes. There's a reason you are where you are, even if no one can see it yet."

_Well, I'm here to pay for the world's sins._

But there's more to it than that. If I'm meant only as the sacrifice, the paper saying so wouldn't've been blank.

I'm seeing only a few pieces of the story, little shards all jumbled up and missing the most important bits. And something deep down inside me, in the part that Mami would tell me to listen to because that's the part where all the truest instincts are, something deep down is whispering that Sahnsor Tí'ath would be able to fill in those missing scenes.


	10. Chapter 10

**Merry Christmas, and thanks for reading! ****~Emm**

* * *

Tí'ath takes me to the garden tonight. That's good. The smell of liali is familiar and steadying.

Silence stretches between us for a while, thick and awkward. I have so much to ask him that I can't figure out what's the most important, or how to start, so, instead, I sit under one of the geena trees and tear up some of the grass around it, just to give my hands something to do. I wonder if Tí'ath feels the pressure of the silence and if he has any idea what's behind it—something about the way he hasn't looked at me since I opened my door makes me think that he does—but he stands by the fountain, arms loosely crossed, watching the water dribble out of what I realize is a crescent moon in the woman's upstretched hand, and doesn't press me.

"It's Tazareen," I say, at the same moment that I recognize the figure.

"It is," he says back.

"Why do they have a statue of an old Anami goddess in the middle of their garden?"

He glances sideways at me and frowns. "What do you know about old Anami goddesses?"

Oops.

"Nothing," I say quickly. "I mean, I know they existed, but I don't know anything about them, really." But it's too late—he already heard me, and the stuttering in my words would mark them as lies even if he hadn't. "We don't worship them or anything," I add, truthfully now. "It's just…my mami likes the stories. They're just stories."

Tí'ath is looking at me now, hard, like he wants to pick the answers out of my head even before he asks the questions. "You both have a touch of rebel in you, don't you?"

"No," I say, but that's obviously a lie, too.

He smiles. "It's all right, Kalima. I won't tell anyone."

And there it is again, that trust I can't stop myself from having for him. Eris forgive me—I never should've said anything. At all. That first day in the palace, the day of the drawing, I should've, I don't know, pretended I couldn't understand his accent, or something. Trusted my instincts and kept my fool mouth shut.

He's still just watching me, his eyebrows pulling together and up like he's worried. "What's wrong?" he asks after a minute.

What's wrong? I throw a piece of grass at the trunk of the nearest geena tree like it's a spear, but it doesn't fly right in the heavy garden air and slumps back to the ground only an arm's-length away from my foot.

What's wrong? Someone fixed the drawing so that I'm going to die, and I don't know why. This Sahnsor, who claims to be the oldest son of the second-highest elder in the elderhood, has gone criminally out of his way to be kind to me, and the elders seem to have let him—and I don't know why.

It's time to change that.

I stand up, brush the stray grass off my robe, and meet those alarming summer-sky-blue eyes with all the boldness I have.

He blinks, a little surprised by the firmness in my stare. Good. Maybe catching him off guard will make him honest.

Because it's my turn to ask the questions.

* * *

Oddly, the first thing out of my mouth isn't a question. I want to ask him who he is really, and why he's doing what he's doing, but what comes out instead is:

"The paper was blank."

Hard. Sharp. A challenge.

Not what either of us expects.

"I'm sorry?" he says.

"The paper the high priest drew, the one with my name on it? It didn't have my name on it."

"How do you—"

"I saw it."

He breathes out, a heavy sigh, and turns away from me, back toward the fountain.

I can feel my eyes go wide, the blood draining from my edges until I'm lightheaded and cold, even in the stifling hot air of the garden. "You _knew_?" I want to shout the words, but I barely have enough breath to whisper, which is probably better, anyway, since I still don't want anyone finding out that I'm not locked up in my room like I'm supposed to be.

His voice is thick like it's coming out of a tight throat. He doesn't look at me. "Yes."

"How?"

He turns around, still without looking at me, and sinks down onto the fountain wall. His hands come up, and his head goes down into them.

I take a few steps toward him, almost close enough to touch his hunched-in shoulders. If anyone ever needed to find some peace, it's him. My voice softens without me telling it to. "I'm sorry," I say. I sit down on the fountain wall, fold my hands together, and tuck them between my knees to hide the fact that they're shaking. "I'm not saying that I think you're responsible for…this. Me being here."

His shoulders twitch, and then he looks up toward the far wall and laughs. It's not loud, but it has sarcastic edges, like a criminal who realizes he's been caught.

I leap to my feet like I've been poked with a burning stick and back away from him until I slam against the trunk of the nearest geena tree. My breath hisses out of my mouth in a string of words that would make Mami scold, but I don't care.

Those sneaking suspicions, the little pricks of warning I've been pushing down or ignoring because I wanted to believe that he likes me, that we're friends—those warnings have been right all along. Because he's not my friend; he's been playing me like a yupper, and I've been letting him.

I've heard people describe betrayal as being stabbed in the back, but I don't think that's quite right. Any stranger can sneak up behind you and shove a knife between your shoulder blades and you'd think it a random act of violence, brutal and dishonorable, maybe, but not really betrayal. This is more like waking up in your own cot one morning to see a knife in your heart and your friend bending over you, grinning and salivating like a wasteland mutt: it's all surprise and horror and but-I-trusted-you. I'm sure pain and fear will be along soon enough, but, for now, there's only shock, so tight that it's hard to breathe.

Then Tí'ath is on his feet, too. He takes one step toward me and stops, one hand half-raised like he wants to put it on my shoulder and sit me back down but doesn't dare. "It's not what you think."

"No?"

"No. I didn't put those blank papers in the tub, I didn't tell the high priest to say your name."

"But you're responsible for it?" There are tears on my cheeks; I wipe them away angrily. "It was your idea, then?"

"Oh, god, no. I never wanted you here. If I could've had my way, you would've had a long and happy life with your mami on the river and never even known I existed."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

And, as quickly as it came, all the heat drains out of him. His shoulders slump, and he drops his head into one hand and rubs at his eyes like he's rubbing at a headache. "Never mind. It doesn't matter."

This isn't working. I haul in the deepest breath I can manage and tell myself to calm down. The scent of liali in the warm air is thick and heavy. Sickening. "Okay. Can you just do me one thing?"

He looks up at me, leaving his hand still over his mouth, and doesn't answer out loud, but something about the expression in his eyes makes me think that, right now, he'd drown himself in the fountain if I asked him to.

"Just answer me honestly. What was your crime?"

"My crime?"

I nod. "The one that stripped you of your right to enter the elderhood. What was it? And don't tell me it doesn't matter," I add, even though he doesn't try to.

"Does it?"

I think about it for the space of one inhale, just long enough to let him know that I've already thought about it and made up my mind. "Yes."

He sucks in a breath and lets it out, loud and slow, then turns back to the fountain. "My crime…." He stares at the figure of Tazareen, the old Anami goddess of the night, with her basket of stars in one hand and crescent moon in the other. In the silver dimness, she glows, like she herself is made up of stars. He bows his head at her for a moment as if in prayer or acknowledgment, and then turns to face me again. "My crime," he says in a voice heavy like a bucketful of river mud, "was you."


	11. Chapter 11

**Happy 2013, everyone! Thanks for reading and commenting.**

* * *

Part Three

_A Trial_  
_Sixteen Turns Ago_

He staggered from the shove of a hand hard on the nape of his neck, jerked himself free, and straightened, tugging at the front of his robe. They were in the judgment hall, and twenty elders looked at him from behind one long table.

"Elder Jí'als, second seat," said Elder Bí'tan, first seat. "What is your complaint?"

So. It was going to be a formal proceeding.

Elder Jí'als stared forward. "My brothers, this _boy_"—he spat the word—"is consorting with an Anami."

Every eye in the court, even those of the slaves and wives, turned on him. He gritted his teeth and glared back.

"Elder Jí'als," said Elder Bí'tan, "I must impress on you the seriousness of your accusation. The punishment for such a crime is death. Are you sure you wish to proceed?"

"I am."

"Then present the accused."

The hand was back on his neck, shoving him forward. He jerked away from it again.

Elder Bí'tan addressed him. "Sahnsor Tí'ath, oldest son of Elder Jí'als, second seat and Holder of the Broaken Chalice."

It seemed pointless holding to the formalities of the court, especially considering the way Elder Jí'als was tossing him around like a bag of duk bones, but he had enough pride yet to take another step forward and bow his head respectfully. "I am here."

"Sahnsor Tí'ath, you have been brought before the court on the accusation of having contact with an Anami, a crime forbidden, not only by law, but by our great and powerful Eí'ris." He paused, waiting.

A thousand excuses, pleas of innocence or misunderstanding, rushed through his head. Elder Jí'als couldn't have more proof than the testimony of the slave that followed him the other night…he could get off.

But, at the same moment, his thoughts turned to Henna. They didn't give trials to Anami—even if he could get off on the claim it was an accident, she wouldn't.

He hesitated a second too long.

"You have nothing to say?" Elder Bí'tan asked.

He lifted his head and looked the elder straight in the face. "She's innocent."

"Then you don't deny the accusation?"

"No."

The entire elderhood shifted in their seats, frowning at him as though they thought he might make a mad leap for their throats. Elder Bí'tan nodded at a slave behind his chair, and the slave came around the table and twisted both arms around his back until it hurt. "Sahnsor Tí'ath, you have been found guilty by your own admission the crime of consorting with an Anami. You will be executed at the rising of the next sun."

The slave turned him around and started marching him from the hall. He'd taken five steps toward the door when he heard a different elder give an order to his own slave: "Kill the Anami."

Henna.

He froze, suddenly unable to feel the pain of the slave shoving at his twisted-around arms, unable to move.

And no doubt the order would extend to Kalima, too….

"No!" He wrenched himself out of the slave's grip and spun around to face the elders. "No, I told you, she's innocent!"

"There is no leniency for Anami."

"But she's innocent! I was the one who had contact with her. This is _my_ crime, not hers."

Raised eyebrows, a rustle of robes against chair legs. He was probably the first person ever to plead mercy for an Anami.

"Nonetheless," Elder Bí'tan said after a moment.

"Please." He looked around the room, meeting the eyes of every elder at the table, then, slowly, turning to look at Elder Jí'als, too. "Please, I'm begging you, don't hurt her."

Elder Bí'tan stood, his face flushing. "Our judgment is passed." To the slave: "Get him out of here."

The slave's hands closed over his wrists again. The other elders stood and started to follow the first seat out of the hall, Elder Jí'als with them.

No, please. The words burned his throat, but he didn't have air enough left to push them out. Eí'ris—Henna was about to die, and Kalima, too, with his promise to protect them still warm in his mouth.

And then, just as Elder Bí'tan opened the door and started into the corridor, he heard himself shout after them. "There's a child!"

* * *

Everyone stopped, and silence as thick as porridge trembled against the glass walls, making the air hard to breathe. He ripped free of the slave again and held out his hands, palms up, as though he had something to offer them in exchange for the lives of his daughter and her mami. "Please, she's just a baby. If you kill her mami, she doesn't have a chance. Punish me however you see fit, but please, don't hurt them."

An agonizing silence, an immense and endless moment. The elders looked at each other, some of them with their mouths opened as though they wanted to speak but couldn't find their voices. Elder Jí'als recovered first. "A…child?"

He nodded. "A little girl, my—" He had to clear his throat before he could continue. "My daughter. She hasn't even seen her first full moon. Please, Papi—"

He was interrupted by the look on Elder Jí'als' face. He'd seen him angry before, seen the flushed cheeks and thin mouth that meant he was about to send his fists flying at whatever was standing in his way, be it his breakfast tray or his slave or his son, but he'd never seen him like this—face a corpse-like gray, jaw hanging open, eyes so full of revulsion and hatred it made him sick to his stomach.

"Please," he whispered. There was no hope left in his voice. "She's just a baby."

Another look passed amongst the elders. Then, slowly, Elder Bí'tan nodded to the slave, and the slave grabbed him by the collar of his robe and dragged him from the hall.

* * *

He spent three days in a dungeon cell, every second of it expecting someone to haul him up to the execution platform and drop an ax on his neck. Waiting for someone to tell him that a slave had dragged Henna from her home and slit her throat, had pressed a hand to Kalima's tiny face and suffocated the life out of her. Feeling the echoes of his promise—_I won't let anything happen to you—_throb against his skull.

For three days, he neither slept nor ate, and he only drank because the prison guard forced water into his hands and stood there watching him until he swallowed it. Otherwise, he was left alone in the permanent darkness of the dungeon—alone but for his thoughts, which were torture.

So, when a slave finally unlocked his cell and gestured him out, he greeted the thought of execution with relief and followed the slave almost happily up the stairs from the dungeon, down the twisting white corridors of the palace, and…

To his own bedroom?

"Would you like something to eat, sir?" she asked.

It took him a moment through his surprise to form words. "You're supposed to take me to the execution block."

The slave held the door open. "No, sir."

"But—"

She put a hand on his back and didn't exactly shove him into the room. "I'll bring you some supper, sir," she said, but then closed the door before he had a chance to answer.

And he heard, very faintly, the click of the lock.


	12. Chapter 12

"Me?" I repeat.

"No, no, that came out wrong. My crime was my relationship with your mami. You were a result, a…surprise. The reason they found out."

I don't say anything, waiting for him to stop talking nonsense.

"No, that's not true. They found out because my papi set a slave on me, and I was stupid enough to think I could just…send her on some errand and sneak out." He exhales through his nose, a bitter almost-laugh. "The lock on the front gate wasn't so strong back then."

The poor confused man—can he even hear what he's saying? But it's getting harder to wait patiently for something sensible to come out of his mouth, harder to not interrupt and set him straight.

His relationship with my mami, indeed.

"You're mad." The words are quiet. "Completely out of your _mind_."

He smiles tiredly. "Sometimes."

"Because, what you're saying, what you're saying is that you're…."

My papi.

* * *

No.

Everything else, I can believe. I can believe there's elders willing and able to fix the drawing, impose their will above Eris's. I can believe there's a crime so awful that the punishment for it is to be stripped of all your divine rights. I can even believe there's a Sahnsor mad enough to be kind to me.

But this? No. This is too much.

* * *

"I'm sorry," Tí'ath says. "I didn't think I'd have to be the one to tell you."

"Tell me?" There's something clawing at the inside of my throat, but, for the moment, my voice is calm.

He comes toward me again, slower, hesitant as though he's approaching an injured mutt that might bite, but stops well beyond reach and just _looks_ at me. "Kalima, you're…" He hesitates, breathes in as though gathering courage, and then lets the rest out before he can change his mind. "You're my daughter."

The words hang there, twisting up with the sickly-sweet scent of liali, waiting for an answer. But what is there to say to that? It takes me a moment to even be able to speak again. "No," I say, as gently as I can. I wish I could show him how very wrong he is without hurting his feelings, but there's no way to do that. "It's impossible. They…they wouldn't allow it."

"They didn't." He blows out a breath. "Eí'ris and all his angels, Kalima, did you think that I'd be here one second longer if they didn't keep me locked up like a duk in its coop? That I wouldn't have been with you and your mami for the last sixteen turns if I was able to leave? Because you'd be wrong."

I have the childish urge to put my hands over my ears and la-la-la to drown him out.

He takes another hesitant step toward me, and I match it with an equal-sized step back, putting the geena tree half-between us. "Don't," I say, my voice breaking.

He backs up against the fountain wall again and sits—or, more falls—down. "I'm sorry. It's a lot to have sprung on you, and I wasn't thinking. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

"Stop. Just…_stop_!" The thing clawing at my throat has found my voice and lodges there like a hard lump of porridge, choking me. I back away.

"Kalima, please—"

I shove my hands against my ears, turn, and run from the garden.

* * *

I slam my door closed behind me the moment I'm back in my room, then lean against it and stare up at the ceiling, shaking fit to break apart. My legs feel about as strong as water; I slide down the door to the floor, press my elbows against my knees, and bury my face in my hands.

It can't be true. It can't be. If it was, we'd all three of us be dead. The elders would've known, and they would've cut off Tí'ath's head, and Mami's, and mine, before I was old enough to sit up.

It can't be true, because it's not possible.

But, if you're going to lie, why lie by saying you've gone against every law and tradition, and even the great god Eris himself, and had a relationship—an intimate relationship, Eris forgive him—with an Anami? It would be one thing if he'd said a town woman, still plenty unlikely, still criminal and sinful, but an Anami? We're nothing more than soulless river mud whose only purpose in the world is to bleed to death for everyone else's sins. Never mind how it got to the point of child-producing—how could a Sahnsor and an Anami be in the same space at the same time, catch each other's eyes, smile, introduce themselves?

I press my fingers against my eyes until I'm seeing colors. They're soft and dark, purples and blues, and they dance around each other in patterns like I saw once when I slipped into town for a day of the festival, and the fruit vendor I stole from sometimes showed me a tube she'd made with bits of colored glass at one end, and when I held it to my eye and rolled it around, the glass made bright, shifting patterns. I wish I could press my fingers past my eyes, into my skull, and pick Tí'ath's words out of my brain.

Just answer me honestly. That's what I asked in that moment I was sure he would've done anything.

_Just answer me honestly. What was your crime?_

_My crime was you. You're my daughter._

Is it honest if you truly believe what you're saying, even if what you're saying is a lie?

I rock up to my knees and press my palms flat against the floor. I should bury my fingers in ash or dirt, draw a line down my forehead and nose and lips with a dirty finger, but there's no dirt on this floor, so I draw the line with a clean fingertip and hope Eris can forgive me for not doing it just right.

_Great and powerful Eris, who rules the suns and the world, please forgive him for his lies and don't let Oxx touch his mind anymore. Don't make him suffer his madness anymore. Please. Please._

I'm praying so hard that the last word comes off my lips, too.

"Please."

* * *

The shaking eventually calms, but, even once it's reduced to only a tremor in my chest, I don't move. There's very little peace on my knees, but there's none at all off them.

I do look up once, out the glass wall at the garden. The suns have come up, blazing bright through the dome and onto the marble walls, winking on the drops of water falling from Tazareen's crescent moon. Tí'ath is still there where I left him, sitting on the fountain wall, elbows propped on his knees, forehead pressed into his palms, and fingers clenched in his hair. I watch him, wondering if he'll move.

He doesn't, not even when two other green-hemmed Sahnsor come into the garden from the other side, laughing loud enough to hear even through the glass. They notice him and go over to him; one bends over and pokes him in the shoulder with a finger, and they both laugh again when he doesn't look up. They click together a moment—their voices aren't nearly so loud as their laughs, so I can't hear them, but the way they leave their mouths half-open as they talk make it clear as hearing them that they're speaking Insect—and Sahnsor Stiff-Finger pokes him again, this time hard enough that it's almost a shove.

Tí'ath picks his head up then, just far enough to look at them overtop his fingers, and even from here I can feel the heat coming off his glare. They must feel it, too, because they both take a step back and look down like boys who realized they've just crossed a line and are now afraid that their mami's going to come at them with a wooden spoon.

Then, finally, Tí'ath stands, moving slowly like his joints hurt, and follows the other two Sahnsor back into the palace.


	13. Chapter 13

Vî'sid comes with breakfast not much later. I hear her fiddle with the lock, then the surprised noise she makes when she tries the door and finds that she actually locked it instead. My stomach turns over once with the fact that someone has found my door unlocked, but I'm too tired to feel anything else, even worry.

Vî'sid bursts into the room without her tray, her eyes scanning the room wildly. I rock back on my heels and wave a little when she sees me. "Are you all right?" I ask, trying to sound normal, but my voice trips and stumbles over my tongue.

Fortunately, she doesn't seem to notice; her shoulders deflate, and she smiles. "Yes, miss. I thought, with the door unlocked…"

"It was unlocked?" I say in my best innocent voice. Mami would frown and tell me to try again, but Vî'sid just deflates the rest of the way and goes to get the tray from where she left it outside the door.

The usual fare. I pick at it for a few minutes, make a few attempts at casual conversation, then finally fall quiet and drink some of the sum'a. As disgusting as it smells—and tastes—the warmth of it going down my throat and into my stomach feels good, and I drink almost half the cup before the mud-grass-and-silt flavor finally forces me to put it down.

Too much longer being fed like this, and I'll forget what real food tastes like. My mind flashes to the feast in the garden, to the bread Ti'ath brought me, with its cheesy crust and savory middle, but the unpleasant feeling of someone twisting the ends of my stomach around like a candy wrapper cuts the memory short.

Vî'sid tidies me up and takes me to morning prayers, sliding into the prayer-room just in time for the palace priest to begin his chanting. I scan the room automatically, and I'm halfway around it before I realize that I'm looking for Tí'ath. A strange tingly feeling like a rush of panic shoots down the insides of my arms, clenches up my stomach, and I look at the faded outlines of what might be a tree, or maybe a fire, near my feet instead.

I am not ready to face Tí'ath. Not yet. Maybe not ever again, not with those insane words—_you're my daughter_—hanging in the air.

Morning prayer goes badly from the first time the priest pauses for what I think is a bow but turns out to be a kneel, and, by the time I notice, practically the whole court is looking at me. Not at me, of course, but there's a sudden thickness in the silence, the faintest rustle of robes against the etched-glass floor. I lift my hands in apology and fall to my knees, but it's too late.

I close my eyes and try to focus. My head is throbbing, deep inside my skull. I breathe in slowly, hold the air in my chest for a moment, then breathe out just as slowly, the way Mami says quiets jumbled thoughts and helps you concentrate.

It doesn't help.

Why do they even bother bringing me to prayers? The best I can do is pretend to know all the right motions and try to make all the right sounds during the call-and-response parts.

Prayer ends eventually, as the suns burn the dawn colors out of the sky, leaving the world pale and scorched. Vî'sid appears out of nowhere as usual and returns me to my room.

"Leave, slave."

The voice is harsh, and so heavy with tongue-clicks that it almost doesn't sound like my language anymore. I whirl around.

Standing in the middle of my room, under the ceiling-hole so that the sunlight bounces sharply white off his robe, is Elder Jí'als.

* * *

All the breathe leaves my body. The elder gives off a feeling of such absolute control, such complete right to be here, that I suddenly feel like I want to beg forgiveness for intruding into his space and slip out the door after Vî'sid. My hand touches the doorknob.

"Don't move," Elder Jí'als says, his eyes on the hand trying the door.

I freeze.

"There is a rumor going around that the sacrifice has been sneaking out of this room the past few nights. Is it true?"

Oh, damn. I thought the doors in this hallway held just empty rooms, that there was no one around to hear anything. Maybe I was wrong.

Or, says the voice in the back of my head, maybe Tí'ath ratted on me. Maybe he told the green-hems who stumbled into him earlier this morning; maybe he's been working with the elders the entire time—though I can't even imagine why he would start going on about being my papi if he were only around to keep me behaved. To distract me? Confuse me? What would be the reason for that?

Elder Jí'als takes a step closer, apparently annoyed to be kept waiting for his answer. "Is it true?" he asks again.

I swallow hard and look up at him. "The door's been locked, and I don't have a key, so how would I be getting out of the room?"

The question itself is innocent enough, but my voice comes out sounding sour—I-can't-believe-he-said-that-to-me sour—and he blinks and twitches backward like I shoved him. Some of the red drains out of his face, showing the pale skin beneath, and I'm probably wrong, but the sudden lack of color makes him look a little bit afraid.

It takes him a moment to pull himself back together, and he does it clumsily, hauling himself up to his full height—he's taller than me by almost a head—and puffing out his chest and gut like his girth will make him more imposing. The color comes back to his face; he takes two large strides toward me and strikes me across the cheek with one meaty hand.

I stumble back against the wall, too surprised at first to feel the pain. No one has ever struck me. Not even accidentally, in a moment of thoughtlessness or play.

Then I do feel the pain, a dull ache that throbs all the way from my temple to my jaw, and I'm glad the wall at my back is sturdy enough to support my weight.

"You do not speak," Elder Jí'als hisses, coming forward again and pressing his face toward mine until I have nowhere to escape. His breath smells faintly like sum'a gone bad. "Is that clear?"

I nod.

"You will remain in this room unless otherwise required by the court," he says. "Is that also clear?"

I nod again.

He straightens a little as if satisfied, but then adds, "This is your only warning. Disobey me, and you will spend your final days in the dungeon hanging by your toes."

Then, with a swish of robes, he sweeps out the door. He slams the door and locks it nosily, scraping the key against the keyhole louder than Tí'ath does when he picks the lock, as if reminding me that I am _locked in_.

As if I need reminding.

I slide to the floor where I'm standing. My hands are shaking. I press one to the stinging spot on my cheek and try to remember how to breathe.

* * *

Evening prayer goes a lot smoother than the morning one did, mostly because I spend the entire time paying attention to what everyone else is doing and don't bow when I should kneel or stay down when I should stand up. I even try to make some of the sounds during the call-and-response parts, though I don't do a very good job of it (some of the clicks, the ones with the tongue, I can sometimes do okay, but the other sounds, the ones made with the lips and throat, I can't make them go into words and just end up sounding like I'm being strangled). Vî'sid looks like she might ask me what happened to my face when she comes to collect me for prayer—from what I can see of my reflection in the glass wall, the entire left side of my face, from my jaw to my temple, has turned into a yellowy bruise—but I just shrug at her lifted eyebrows and half-opened mouth, and she doesn't ask the question.

Still, she watches me eat and puts me to bed with particular attention and pauses on her way out the door. "If you need me, miss," she says, "you can always summon me."

"I know. Thank you."

"Goodnight, miss." She leaves, locking the door behind her.

I'm out of the bed in the next second. My head is aching, but not in the way that'll let me lie still and go to sleep—more in the way that's going to keep me up all night, and the bruise across my face is not the only reason.

I stare out at the garden. The moon's up, visible in that slice of space between where the garden wall meets the glass dome and where my glass wall meets the ceiling. The moon will be full the same day as the sacrifice, when the two suns merge into one; now, six days before, it looks like a fruit sliced through the middle, but the garden is dark and the sky is clear, and the moon is more than bright enough to see by.

Not that there's anything to see: just the trees and liali and the fountain with its low wall where Tí'ath sat for hours with his head in his hands like his last ray of hope had just been snuffed into blackness.

I did that when I jammed my hands into my ears and ran away from him like he was coming at me with the high priest's knife. He was spouting the most ungodly lies, and I don't think even the elders would fault me for doing everything I could not to listen, but did I really have to be so mean about it? Couldn't I have found a less rude, childish way to make him stop?

But I tried that, didn't I? Tried to explain why what he was saying is impossible. Asked him to stop. And he didn't.

I sit down on the bed, run my hands across my eyes in an attempt to reach the headache that's been pounding away in there all day, like my skull's a wall that needs to be knocked down. But I'm no better at easing my own pain than I am at easing other people's—worse, even, because the pain's too hard to concentrate on when I'm the one actually feeling it—and the whole idea of me trying to make it go away is pointless. What I need is Mami; she'd have this headache under control in less time than it'd take to tell her about it.

What I really need is to not be so wrapped up in the delusions of a madman.

I lay down, liking the way my head sinks into the pillows, the way the bed kind of sucks my body into it. If there is anything to say that's good about the white stone palace, this is it: I love the bed. It's so much kinder to an exhausted body than my scratchy, half-broken old cot at home would've been, and, for a moment, I imagine taking it home (never mind how I'd carry it from the palace and down the steps and through the town—it's not like I'm going to go home again either). I'd set it up just behind the fire pit, probably the only place where it could possibly fit, and Mami would laugh and laugh when she came in and saw it. "Where're we going to cook?" she'd ask, because the bed would take up almost the complete insides of our hut.

But I would've already thought this through. There'd be plenty of time to do that as I carried the bed home. "We'll have our cooking fire outside and just use this one for warmth at night. And, anyway, there's so many blankets on this thing we might not need any fires at all!"

She'd sigh and shake her head like she does sometimes when she runs out of things to say to me. But she'd let the bed stay—how could she not?—and neither of us would ever again have to sleep on cots made of patched-together bits of cloth too itchy to be clothes with joints and legs that are always breaking.

Home is so bright and sharp in my mind that I can almost reach out and touch that big crack that runs through the wall beside my cot, can almost smell the faintly-sour scent of the dried mud-grass that makes up the roof. I'm crying, but silently; even with homesickness making my stomach feel like it's been cut open and my guts removed one gut at a time, I don't have the energy to put any real force behind my tears, so they ooze from my eyes, leaving thin cold trails down my cheeks.

And, after what feels like a lifetime but is really not much longer than it takes for the moon to disappear from view, I'm able to close my eyes and fall asleep. Tonight, for once, I don't dream.


	14. Chapter 14

Morning, when it comes, surprises me. Maybe that's silly—mornings always come when they're meant to—but it's true, and it's not until Vî'sid has made me eat, tidied me up, and has me halfway to the prayer-room that I realize why.

Tí'ath didn't come to see me last night.

Was I really expecting him to? Well…no, not really. I mean, you'd have to be a lot stupider than he is to think my running-off-with-my-hands-in-my-ears meant anything other than _stay away from me_. But there's a strange knot lurching around in the pit of my stomach, and it's different and distinct from the constant hollowed-out feeling of homesickness.

Disappointment. Maybe I didn't really expect Tí'ath to show up last night at my door with his little silver knife, pick the lock, and take me out to the garden like the night before never even happened, but a part of me—and a part large enough to summon up some pretty serious disappointment—hoped he would anyway.

So this morning, when my eyes flash automatically around the prayer-room, I don't stop them. Despite telling myself that I just want to be prepared in case he decides to come up to me, the real truth is that I want to see him—even if he doesn't come up to me. In my mind, I keep seeing him the way I did last, sitting on the fountain wall with his head in his hands, all hope gone like smoke on a windy day, and that image isn't going to go away until I have something else to replace it.

But Tí'ath isn't here.

At first, I think I must've just missed him—I'm in the back, near the wives, and some people I can't see between the heads and arms and robes. But his red-haired friend isn't far from where I'm kneeling, and Tí'ath is always somewhere near his red-haired friend.

Except, this morning, I can't see him anywhere, near his friend or not.

"Vî'sid?" I say once we're back in my room.

"Yes, miss?"

"Everyone in the palace goes to prayers, don't they?"

She frowns a little, maybe confused by the question, but answers. "Yes, miss."

"Everyone? All the time?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Thank you."

She starts to go, but pauses at the door and turns around. "Are you all right, miss?"

I think about saying no. I imagine telling her about the headache that makes my skull feel like an unwanted but stubborn wall, the homesickness that's making it hard to sleep at night. And then, because I'm imagining things, I imagine her saying that she's so sorry for her small but important part in keeping me here and that she's going to make it better by unlocking the door and bringing me to the front gate and unlocking that, too.

"I'm fine," I tell her. "Thank you."

She smiles faintly at me, and I think it's meant to be encouragement. Then she leaves, locking the door behind her.

* * *

Days pass without much to mark their passing. Sum'a and porridge, morning and evening prayer—all the same, every day. Mostly the only thing that marks the time is that, the closer the sacrifice comes, the more I start to hurt. I've never realized before how painful life can be, how each motion can ache all the way down to my bones, how each breath can burn like I'm trying to breathe water. Life _hurts_—but I don't want the pain to end.

As long as I'm hurting, I tell myself, I'm alive, and that, at least, is something I can believe in.

But the silence, the aloneness, is going to drive me mad.

Maybe that's the point. I asked Mami after my first drawing why they wait ten days between the drawing and the sacrifice. "Wouldn't it be better to have them happen on the same day?" I said. She gave some answer about how it's because that's the start of the suns' coming-together time, which I never questioned, but now I wonder if it's not really about the suns at all. Maybe they need to drive me mad so that, when it comes time for the sacrifice, I won't have wits enough left to do anything but let the high priest cut my throat.

Maybe by then I'll welcome it. Count the ritual murder as a kindness.

_They'll make sure I live with it for a good long time._

It's hard not to remember Tí'ath saying those words, as if living is the worst kind of punishment. I didn't understand how anyone could think such a thing—wouldn't death be worse? At least, as long as you're alive, you can do something about your problems.

But even that's a lie. Sometimes, things are what they are, and nothing you can do will change them. And maybe that's when living becomes the worst punishment: when you're forced to do it alone and powerless. Maybe Tí'ath isn't quite as insane as I think, just helpless, as unable to change his fate as…well, as I am.

The days pass.

* * *

Five days before the sacrifice. It rains. Water patters at the ceiling and dribbles onto the floor, and the sound of raindrops striking marble wakes me up just before the suns (would've) come up. I look at the puddle growing on my floor from the hole in the ceiling. Do the elders really let the rain into their white stone palace like this? Maybe not. Maybe all the other ceiling-holes are covered somehow, and they just didn't bother to cover mine.

At home, rainy days are the best—no need to spend half the day lugging, filtering, and boiling drinking water when fresh water is falling from the sky. The sand toads come out, so many of them that you can't wiggle your toes without hitting a meal, and the bareel explode with so many berries that you can gather buckets of them without having to wage war on their spines.

But palace life doesn't change for rain the way it does at home. Wake up, morning prayer, breakfast, evening prayer, dinner, sleep. The only thing different about today is that I can see the garden without squinting.

* * *

Four days. It's still raining, as if to make up for lost time.

* * *

Three days. There's another feast in the garden where I'm again not allowed to eat. I hoped at first that things might happen like the last time, and I'd get an illicit piece of bread out of the day—or at least conversation—but that hope dies almost right away when I see that Tí'ath isn't here.

Again.

My nervousness about seeing him has been flipping between impatience and full-out worry since I first noticed that he wasn't coming to prayers. I pushed it away for a while, told myself that there must be plenty of reasons why a person might miss a prayer or two. He could be sick, or traveling. Maybe the Hyte are in town, and he's gone to buy one of their little sanstone figurines.

No one ever seemed to have a problem with us talking before—didn't I a few times see Elder Jí'als notice it and then look away like he was ignoring us? Maybe that's why Tí'ath's sudden, unexplained disappearance feels so deliberate, like someone's trying now to keep us apart.

But why now? Wouldn't that energy have been better spent on never letting us meet in the first place? It could've been done: his redhead friend didn't have to leave us alone the morning of the drawing; Elder Jí'als didn't need to look away during that first feast. Why would it be so much worse now for us to talk, since that particular crime and sin has already marked us both for damnation? What's changed?

I think about the flash of panic I saw in Vî'sid's eyes the morning she came to my room to find my door unlocked and answer my own question almost before finishing it:

They found out. They thought Tí'ath was just slipping me bits of bread and maybe a word or two, and that, for whatever reason, was all right. But then they found out about the unlocked door, and suddenly it's dangerous.

But the lock on the front door is sound, they must know that, and clearly I haven't tried to escape, so I don't know what they think could be dangerous.

_Unless…_

No. It's not possible.

But the idea won't leave me alone.

_Unless they're afraid of what he might say to me._

* * *

Two days.

I jolt awake in the moonlit darkness of early morning. Something is wrapped tight around my arms and legs, pinning them down, and I kick wildly at it for a moment before I realize it's just my robe. My fingernails are biting into my palms; I pull in a breath—which feels strange and achy like I've been screaming—and force my hands out of their hard fists, then lift them up to touch my throat. It's still there.

It was just a dream. But this one was worse than the others I've been having in the palace, though now that I'm awake, I can't remember anything about it.

Morakee said once that, if you die in your dreams, then you die in real life. I didn't believe her at the time (mostly because she lies like other people breathe air), but now I wonder if there's not some truth to that story, if there's not some way to really be scared to death.

I sit up and pull my knees to my chest, hugging them tight like they can protect me somehow. The moon is shining through the ceiling-hole. It's almost completely round, just a small dent on the top like an orange that's sat a little too long on a fruit seller's cart.

It's not really night anymore—the sky is gray around the edges of the moon, and the stars are going out—but the moon is still holding on to its sky for as long as possible.

This kind of moon sometimes got Mami to tell stories about Tazareen, myths her mami told to her and Aunt Fikie when they were very little. "Tazareen was the most beautiful of all the goddesses," Mami would say. Her voice was different when she was telling a story, softer and lower, and it made her sound just the way I always imagined oracles sounding whenever they predicted the future. "So beautiful that the suns would turn away in envy. When Eris saw her beauty, he wanted it for himself, and he went to her court and presented himself to her. 'I am the great and powerful Eí'ris,'"—she always tried to pronounce it correctly when she said his words, with the tongue-click in the middle, and was pretty good at it—"'and all creatures in this world worship me. I have seen your beauty from afar and have longed for it. I therefore implore you to accept me as your husband.'

"But Tazareen was not moved by his words. 'You are worshipped by all the world,' she said, 'so why do you desire me? I have nothing but the night sky.'

"'If you accept me, I will give you the day-sky to rule as your own. The suns will do your bidding, and my angels with see to your every whim.'

"Then Tazareen was angry and turned him out of her palace, saying, 'Great and foolish Eí'ris, I see you know me not. For, if you did, you would know that I cannot be bought with the promise of slaves and the begrudging loyalty of suns. I have my own people, and they worship me because they love me, not because they fear me. Your arrogance and conceit will bring death to your world, and I will none of you.'"

I always liked that story particularly and would beg constantly for it to be my bedtime tale, but she told it only rarely, and always warned me that I shouldn't repeat it, and now, staring up at the nearly-full moon, I think I know why. It's not so much about the blasphemous idea of having a story with both Eris and Tazareen together: it's more because Eris—the great and omniscient Eris—is _wrong_ about Tazareen, wrong to think that she'd be moved by his words. Wrong to think that by offering her power and glory, she would fall into his arms and worship him.

And, if Eris is wrong about that, even if just in a myth told by Anami mamis to their bedded children, what else could he be wrong about?

I don't sleep again tonight, plagued by jittery energy and the promise of nightmares. So, instead, I pace in front of the glass wall, back and forth, back and forth, my fingers running lightly over the surface of the glass, feeling the perfect smoothness, the icy coldness, of the wall.

Beautiful and cold. It seems fitting.


	15. Chapter 15

After morning prayers, Vî'sid doesn't bring me back to my room like usual; instead, she takes me down steps, the first I've seen since climbing to the palace, though fortunately, these steps aren't ever going to have wildly-untrue stories told about them. Still, they bring us deep into the palace, deeper than I knew the palace went, and the hallways we walk through now are lit only with flickering yellow torches that give off thin streams of smoke. The walls are made of marble, but the marble's gray with age and smoke.

We pass another set of stairs that we don't go down, and that, at least, is a relief. The air coming up from those stairs smells stale and tastes like smoke and mold. The dungeon. I think about Elder Jí'als warning me that I could spend my last days down there hanging from my toes, and I shiver, grateful for a moment that, trapped as I might be, at least I'm not being forced to wait for the sacrifice down there.

We continue past the dungeon to a door at the end of the hallway. Vî'sid opens it and takes me inside. It's hard to see anything about the room, its size or shape, because it's so packed up with cloth. There's cloth everywhere: piled in corners, scattered across the floor, hanging on long metal rods from the ceiling. Cloth of every color and texture, green and red and yellow and blue, woven and beaten and sewed and knitted. There's ribbons and threads and tassels heaped on a table to the right and a monstrous, half-wrecked loom on the left.

"You're late."

The voice seems to be coming from the pile of ribbons and things, and then a woman pops up her head up from behind them and frowns at me. She's middle-aged, with pale yellow fuzz sticking out all around her head like her hair's growing back after being shaved. A widow, maybe. I'm halfway to an I'm-sorry, but then I just bite my lip and pick at those little buttons on my sleeve.

The woman leaps up from the table and rushes at me. "Don't!"

I freeze.

She slaps at my hand, and I put it down at my side. "Stay there and don't move," she says, then turns and goes to the chest of drawers shoved against one wall, opening the top drawer and releasing the smell of unfamiliar, sharp-scented herbs that make my stomach long for something other than porridge and mud-grass tea. She removes a paper-wrapped bundle from the drawer and carries it over to me cradled in her arms like a baby.

She tugs at one edge of the paper, catches a corner of the cloth inside, and, in one well-practiced motion, separates the cloth from the paper and lets it flutter to the floor. At first, the only thing I notice about it is it's color:

Red.

Blood red, to be exact, and trimmed in black darker than the night sky.

I reach out with one finger and lightly touch the fabric. It's light as air and smooth as water, and I can't even begin to guess what kind of material could make such a cloth.

The woman is still standing there, holding the cloth out to me like she expects me to do something with it, and, when I don't, she sighs. "What, you expect me to fit it without any measuring?" she says in a complaining voice. "Try it on!"

And then I realize what it is. Probably that should've been obvious right away—surely there's only one piece of fabric in the entire world that color—but I don't put it into words until now. My hand jerks away as though the fabric had suddenly caught fire.

This strange piece of cloth—it's the ceremonial robe.

* * *

All the blood swirls away from my head, leaving me feeling like I might faint, or throw up; my breath catches in my throat in what could very quickly become a sob, but I clench my teeth together and don't let it. Why is the reality of the sacrifice hitting me like a surprise? I've known it was coming since the moment the high priest said my name in the town square, and especially in the last couple of days. But somehow, I never thought it would really happen. Dreamed about it, yes, but dreams are not reality. You wake up from dreams.

You don't wake up from the sacrifice.

The woman's lips move again, but I can't hear what she's saying through the dizziness in my head. I pull in a few breaths and tell myself to calm down before I'm sick all over the floor.

Vî'sid helps me out of my own robe, and the woman—she must be the palace seamstress—puts me into the ceremonial robe, then sets to work measuring with her fingers and putting in pins from the pin cushion.

I run my fingers over the sleeve. The fabric is soft against my skin, a little cold, and very light, like a gust of air when the weather changes. There's stitching on the black edges, black thread on black cloth, in straight lines that loop around the entire cuff like carefully-stitched hemmings.

I can feel the blood of countless other Anami running through those hems. Had they, too, traced them and thought about those who came before, or those who would come after? Had they, too, stood quiet and still while the seamstress clattered and mumbled around them, moving this and adjusting that, lifting hems and pinning seams?

And what did the seamstress say to them, the other Anami children she's garbed for their deaths? Unlike most Sahnsor, she seems to be free of the no-contact restriction—which I suppose can't be helped; if they want the robe to fit right, they'd have to have someone able to make it fit right—but then she's only a wife (at least a former one), so maybe it doesn't matter.

Elder Jí'als had contact with me, those days ago when he came into my room, threatened me, struck me. For any other Sahnsor to any other Anami, that much contact, even in the form of such abuse, would be automatic death to both. But maybe I don't count as even an Anami anymore.

And, anyway, who would there be to punish an elder? There's no one above them.

* * *

I'm too restless to lie down that evening. Instead, I stand at the glass wall, one hand resting on its cold, smooth surface, trying to get a glimpse of the moon from between the garden wall and my ceiling.

And then there are tears clawing at my eyes and sobs ripping up my breath.

I don't want to die.

Of course I don't want to die—I'm only sixteen and should still have plenty of time left to fall in love and be a wife, to hear and tell stories, to laugh and run and swim, to have friends and children and a life of my own.

But I don't, and it's not fair.

A piece of sob breaks through my clenched-tight teeth and shatters against the glass. The glass doesn't break or even tremble, doesn't react at all. And then I'm throwing myself at it, hitting it with my shoulders and elbows and feet, beating it with my fists. I want, more than I've ever wanted anything in my short life, to feel it shudder, crack, give even the smallest sign that it notices me. A scream, wordless and muffled, burns in my ears and leaks from my throat. It consumes my world.

I can't keep up my attack on the wall for long; my voice and energy give out together. I slump to my knees and press my forehead against the glass. The cold glass feels nice against my hot face, and the coolness calms the sobs still shredding my breath. The garden is dark, the fountain hard to see, the far wall almost invisible. The torch Vî'sid brought with her a few nights ago flickers behind me, and something besides the garden catches my eye.

My reflection.

I don't look at myself a lot, mostly because the only way I've ever had to look is in the surface of the river, which moves too much to make a good reflection, and Mami doesn't care what I look like, anyway. So, it's kind of a strange thing for me to see myself, and the dark garden makes the glass into an excellent mirror, better than anything else I've tried before. I stare at myself like I expect the reflected me to have the answers to my problems. Hair dusky-black and braided into a thousand tiny braids. Skin too light, like the river after a storm has stirred up the mud on the bottom. Eyes the color of a clear summer sky.

"Your papi's eyes were the exact same color," Mami told me when I was little and could still ask those questions.

I frown. Reflected me frowns back.

What am I?

_You're my daughter._

Every time I think I've finally got those words out of my head, there they are again, slapping me in the face with their impossibility. And maybe it's just that I've got nothing left to lose, that even my own sanity is hanging by an increasingly-frayed thread, but suddenly I'm wondering, what if he isn't delusional? What if he was telling the real and honest truth?

It's the one question I never even thought to ask because of the sheer impossibility of the idea. But now, staring out at nothing and barely more than two days from my death, even the idea of my papi being a Sahnsor doesn't sound quite as impossible as it should.

So…what if it's true? What would that make me?

A mistake. A crime.

But also…something impossible. Something _new_.

I look again at the glass. Reflected me stares back speculatively. Black hair. Brown skin. Blue eyes. And questions.

Dangerous questions.


	16. Chapter 16

I should've had Tí'ath teach me to pick locks when I had the chance. Regret tickles me now as I kneel in front of the door, trying to make the wrong end of the spoon that came with dinner turn just so in the lock to open it—the same thing I've been doing for an hour or more. I blow out a frustrated breath, jam the spoon handle at a painful angle into the lock, and spin it all the way around, not caring anymore if the stupid handle just snaps in two.

The lock clicks, and the door pops open a finger-width.

I laugh once, as much surprised as pleased, and start to open the door but pause with my hand on the knob. This could earn me quality time in the dungeon—hanging by my toes, if Elder Ji'als' threat is to be believed. But I don't care anymore; trapped is trapped.

I'm done being trapped.

I open the door and stare down the hallway, and that's when the real problem hits me: I don't have any idea where I'm going. The only places in the palace I know how to get to are the garden and the prayer room.

I've never summoned Vî'sid before, but she did tell me I could if I needed her, so I go over to the bed and pull the metal-link cord that hangs over it, which I assume is what it's for, since it doesn't appear to have any other purpose.

She shows up a few minutes later, her eyes widening when she sees the opened door. "What—" she starts to say, but I slap my hand over her mouth and pull her into the room.

"Please don't say anything," I whisper once the door shuts behind us. "I'm not trying to escape, I just need your help."

She stares at me.

"Please? You must know I have no chance of getting out of here, and I promise I'm not trying. Please, would you help me?"

She blinks, lets out a breath, then nods slowly.

"Thank you." I take my hand off her mouth. "I need to find Sahnsor Tí'ath." I've been practicing saying his name with the click and am starting to sound like I'm not being strangled by the effort.

Vî'sid's eyes go wide again. "You can't, miss," she says. "Elder Jí'als has forbidden anyone to see him."

I roll my eyes. "Elder Jí'als would forbid the suns to shine if he thought they'd listen."

That makes her smile, barely more than a twitch of her lips, but it's enough to give me hope.

"Please, Vî'sid. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important."

She considers me for long enough to have me wondering what I'll do when this fails. But then, something changes. It's hard to say exactly what, if maybe she'd straightened her spine or pushed back her shoulders, but I can't tell any one particular thing. I do recognize the look, though; it's the same look that Mami gets when someone comes to her so badly sick or injured that everyone else has all but buried their bodies. "This way," she says.

I smile and follow her into the hallway.

I half-expect her to take me down to the dungeon, but she doesn't; we go down hallways without stairs, pausing at every twist and intersection to listen for other people coming. But it's getting late, and the palace is silent as the graveyard behind the temple, where it's a nasty sin to make more noise than a whisper, and we don't run into anyone until the hallway we're in spits out into another long, straight one maybe ten minutes from my room.

Vî'sid starts to turn left around the corner, but then freezes, and I do, too. At first, I don't see what she's looking at, and I'm about to ask what's wrong when I see by the torchlight what she's pointing at.

There's someone else in the hallway: a slave standing about three doors down. She's middle-aged and stern-faced, and she stands like a rock, feet apart, arms crossed over her bare chest. Muscles bulge in her shoulders and upper arms.

"That's where we're going, isn't it?" I whisper.

Vî'sid nods. "That's Sahnsor Tí'ath's room."

So, he's been under guard. At least that explains why I haven't seen him in so long. I exhale through my nose, quietly, but the sound is frustrated.

"We should go back, miss. If anyone catches you here, they'll—"

"Kill me?" I suggest. The words come out bitter.

She shakes her head. "They'll kill _me_."

"So we won't get caught."

"But—"

"No, listen, we just have to get past the slave."

"How?"

I frown. "Distract her, somehow. Get her to move away from the door."

We're both quiet for a moment, thinking, then Vî'sid smiles. "Stay here, and keep quiet," she says and runs off down the hall before I can ask her what she's doing.

She barrels into the muscly slave, her breath coming in gasps like she's been running for an hour. She stares up at the muscly slave and puts her hands on the other woman's shoulders. "Thanks to Eris, I found you!" she cries between breaths. "The Anami girl, the sacrifice, she got out of her room. Her door, the lock, I think it's broken, and I can't find her. Please, you have to help me, I have tell someone, but someone needs to find her!"

I press my hand over my mouth to keep in the giggles.

The muscly slave's eyebrows come so far down that they almost cover her eyes. "Wake the elders. I'll find the Anami." They sprint off in different directions, the muscly slave further down the hall, Vî'sid back the way she came. She meets my eyes and winks as she passes me.

Once they're both clear of the hall, I sneak around the corner and to the door. I try the doorknob, but it's locked (of course), so I tap on the door with the back of one finger.

A few hushed tongue-clicks answer my knock.

"Tí'ath?" I ask.

A pause.

"Kalima?" I can barely hear him through the door.

"Can I talk to you?"

Another pause, but, before I can take his non-response as a no, there's the familiar scraping sound in the lock, and his door opens.

* * *

Tí'ath's room is very like my own: white and bare of furnishings except for a bed and a small round table, only his has a chair pulled up to it. There is a view of the garden, but from a different angle, the wall and a patch of liali, rather than the fountain, at the center, and the glass space is smaller, a window rather than a wall.

Tí'ath himself takes several steps back when I come through the door. He looks awful in the torchlight brightening his room, thin and gray like he's aged a dozen turns in the few days since I last saw him, the rings under his eyes so dark they look like bruises. His face flickers over a few different expressions, but settles on that familiar too-full smile. "Kalima," he begins, and then stops like he doesn't trust himself to say anything else.

I lean against the wall near the door, my boldness spent, and struggle for something to say. "Hi."

It's the best I can do.

The fire from torch across the room crackles, and that quiet sound is almost deafening.

"Am I—?"

"How did—?"

We both stop, embarrassed.

"Go ahead," he says gently.

"I'm not…intruding?" I ask.

"Of course not."

"Good." I smile, try to make my voice light. "Your turn."

"What are you doing here?" His voice is barely louder than a breath.

I shrug. "I don't like being stuck in my room."

He smiles again, a little more properly, but it's still off, like it's trying, and utterly failing, to be a smile. "Kalima—" he starts, but I cut him off.

"Wait, before you say anything, I actually wanted to tell you, I'm sorry."

"You don't—"

"And I know you don't think I have anything to apologize for, but…I shouldn't've stormed out on you like that."

He shakes his head. "You were upset."

"Hysterical," I correct him. "That doesn't make it okay. It was rude and childish and mean, and I'm sorry."

He shakes his head again, not dismissing my apology but more like he can't quite believe that I'm giving one. "You're…"

"Forgiven?" I suggest when he seems to have a difficult time finishing the thought.

"Of course."

I smile, and he smiles back, and we're quiet for a the space of a few breaths, but this quiet is all right, peaceful, with no need for words to fill it.

Which is why I'm horrified to feel tears pounding at my eyes. I thought my little tantrum last night drained me of all my tears, but I guess I was wrong. I breathe in hard and ignore them. "Also, I thought you should know that I…" My voice tries to break; I pull in another hard breath—this one trembles—and force myself to say it. "I believe you. About you being my papi."

It's not until I say those words, until I've put them out into the open where I can't put them back, that it really sinks in. It's not that I lied, but this is the first time I've put those words in that order, even to myself, and now they feel _real_, the way being fitted for the ceremonial robe yesterday made the sacrifice feel real.

And now the tears are coming, spilling past my eyes and onto my cheeks. I wipe at them, but every time I wipe one away, two more fall in its place.

Tí'ath takes two steps toward me, and for a moment, I wonder if he might put his arms around me and hug me, and suddenly all I can think of is how much I want him to. For a moment, I wonder what it would be like to let myself cry into his shoulder, to have him hold me and tell me that everything will be all right.

But he stops after those two steps like he's not sure I'd want him any closer, and I can't seem to make the words to tell him otherwise.

Why does that make my throat tighten with a fresh round of tears? I put my hands over my eyes, breathe in and out, and tell myself that I'm too old to cry like this over nothing. It helps—a little. At least I'm able to get myself back under control, wipe the rest of the tears away, and look up again.

"Kalima?"

"I'm okay." I clear the fist-sized lump from my throat and swallow it. It tastes sour. I meet his eyes and smile to prove it.

There's one last thing I have to say, and I do it quickly, before I lose my nerve altogether.

"I decided that I'm not going to die."

* * *

Even as I'm saying it, I realize how ridiculous I sound—like a child bragging that he can count the stars. I say it anyway, firmly, without any question in my voice.

"Decided?" he repeats, raising an eyebrow.

I nod. Something in his tone makes me feel like I've gone berry hunting during the dry season and come back with a load of bareel spines in my hand. "I thought, it'd be better. If I didn't die."

He makes an I-can't-believe-she-said-that kind of noise, something halfway between a laugh and a sigh. "Of course, _of course_, it'd be better. It'd be…." He trails off, looks away, runs his fingers over his eyes. When he speaks again, his voice sounds broken. "But is that really something you can _decide_?"

He has a point. No one questions the sacrifice. Not ever.

Maybe it's time someone does.

"I don't know," I admit. "But no one's ever supposed to decide that they're going to break every law and tradition that forbids contact between Sahnsor and Anami, either."

Tí'ath looks back at me, but now there's a hint of a smile tugging on his face.

"I was thinking last night, what if I just…refused to be the sacrifice? I don't know, I don't know if that's something I can decide. Maybe that's not the important part. Maybe the important part is that I've decided to try.

"For the first time in my life, I have a…a papi…," I stumble a little over the word, but press on anyway, "and maybe I'm not ready to give him up so soon."

He watches me as I talk like a drowning man breathes air, all the frown lines around his eyes and on his forehead carved deep on his face, the sleepless rings shadow-dark under his eyes. But there's a new light in his eyes, one I've never seen there before—something that, if given the chance, could become hope.


	17. Chapter 17

Part Four

_A Sentence:_  
_Sixteen Turns Ago_

They gathered in the judgment hall late at night, and, though Elder Bí'tan, first seat, called for immediate order, none of the others could sit still. They fidgeted and paced and spoke too quickly, words layering on top of each other.

"How could this happen?

"How was it never known?"

"Never mind how it happened, what are we going to _do_?"

"There must be some precedent—surely this isn't the first time?"

"Order, order!" Bí'tan called above the buzz of voices. He rapped his knuckles on the table. "The council will stay formal and civilized, or every one of you will take turns spending a night in the dungeon."

That quieted everyone.

"Better. And now that we can hear ourselves speak—my brothers," his eyes went around the room, gathering the others to his words, "we are here to discuss the sentence of Sahnsor Tí'ath, oldest son of Elder Jí'als, second seat and Holder of the Broaken Chalice, who by his own admission is guilty not only of having contact with an Anami, but of producing a child with the same.

"I am afraid, my brothers, that this is indeed the first time such a crime has been committed. Sahnsor Hí'gil has scoured all our books of law and history and found nothing that could guide us in this instance."

One man cleared his throat meaningfully.

"Elder Mí'kak, twelfth seat," Bí'tan said, recognizing him before the rest of the elderhood.

"The law is clear," Elder Mí'kak said. "They must die."

Bí'tan opened his mouth to acknowledge the suggestion, but Elder Gí'bar, eighth seat, cut in before he could. "But this is worse than a simple breach of law. This could destroy our peace, our government, our very system of living."

"So we execute them in a public assembly, as an example to the rest of the world," Elder Mí'kak said. His voice grew sharp.

"And you heard him," Elder Sí'vet, fourteenth seat, put it, "how eager he was to assert that it was his crime, to plead mercy for the Anami. If these are the feelings of our sons, I question whether a single execution would be enough to reverse that tide."

"If we execute them in public, before the world," Elder Mí'kak insisted.

"If I may, brothers?"

The quiet voice cutting through the heated words made them all turn.

"Elder Jí'als, second seat," Bí'tan said, glad to be able to bring the council under his control again. "Yes, it is your son we speak of."

Until that moment, Elder Jí'als had been the only one in the entire room who had been sitting still, without pacing or fidgeting. Now, he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "I submit to you that we spare their lives. _All_ their lives."

"Affection makes you lenient, brother," Elder Mí'kak said.

"No such thing, for he ceased to be my son the day he touched an Anami," Elder Jí'als shot back, and his voice was so cold that a few elders shivered in sudden sympathy for the boy.

"Go on," Bí'tan urged after a moment.

"We confine him inside the palace, strip him of his right to enter the elderhood—my second wife gave me sons capable of inheriting my seat—and allow the abomination to grow up in the river mud where it belongs. And then, when it comes of-age, perhaps our great and powerful Ei'ris will show us what must be done."

He fell silent, meeting each of the other's eyes, waiting for them to understand his meaning.

"Ah," Bí'tan said, and the word was a sigh.


	18. Chapter 18

Getting back to my room is probably the panickiest thing I've ever done, sneaking behind Vî'sid and an elder I don't know down hallway after hallway, hoping that they'll go back to my room but give me a chance to slip back inside before someone sees me. Fortunately, sneaking around in the nighttime palace isn't terribly hard—the hallways are empty, the torches leave lots of shadows, and my bare feet are quiet on the hard floor.

They end up in the garden at some point, and I'm able to find my way from there. Vî'sid shows up alone a few minutes later. She looks at me, and I look at her, and then we both laugh.

"Well done," I say. "I guess the entire palace will be in an uproar soon enough."

She giggles and seems pleased to keep it up for as long as she can. I wonder if she's thinking about the ridiculousness of a slave girl and an Anami sacrifice throwing the white stone palace into chaos—I know I am.

Then my laughter quiets. "Thank you, Vî'sid," I say, putting all my sincerity into the words.

Her laughing fades out, too, and she looks at me with her eyebrows furrowed and her lips pursed, and I have the strangest feeling that she's trying to beat back a surge of emotion. Then, quick as a bee to honey, she crosses the room toward me and puts one arm around my neck in an awkward hug. "Thank you, Kalima," she whispers, then spins around and hurries out the door before I can say anything else.

* * *

I can't imagine I'll be able to sleep tonight, but I'm so tired from so many days of so little sleep that I drop off nearly as soon as my head touches the pillows, and I don't even dream of the high priest or his knife.

Instead, I dream of home. Of Mami's and my hut on the river bank, and we're eating a dinner of flatbread with just a drizzle of honey over it like we're celebrating, and then a voice that doesn't belong to Mami or me says something, and I look up to see Tí'ath is also sitting with us, right there on the packed-dirt floor of our hut in his green-edged Sahnsor robe, and I know in the way that you sometimes just know in dreams that it's okay he's there, that none of us are hiding the fact that a Sahnsor is sitting in our hut on the river and having dinner with us, that none of us are worried the elders might drag us to the execution block and drop an ax on our necks for the crime and the sin we're committing.

That it is no longer a crime and a sin for him to look at us and smile, or for us to look at him and smile back.

* * *

It's still dark when a hand shaking my shoulder pulls me out of sleep. For a few moments, as my eyes creak open and my brain struggles awake, the dream coats my thoughts, and I feel better than I've felt in days.

But then an unfamiliar voice heavy with tongue-clicks says, "Get her ready," and I remember that my dream is not real.

I sit up, but the elder's out the door without another word. I look over at Vî'sid, prepared to smile and say good morning, then am on my feet, reaching toward her.

"Great god Eris, what happened?"

She looks like the boy I saw Mami treat when I was nine, the one a couple of drunk town men had beaten with sticks: one eye purplish and swollen shut, blood smeared and dried below her nose. Bruises continue down her face and onto her shoulders and arms.

She takes two quick steps back from me, her eyes fixed on the floor. "Will you eat, miss?"

"Vî'sid—"

She shoves a bowl of porridge into my hands.

I sit back down and eat quietly, not really noticing what I'm doing. The complete feeling my dream gave me, that little spark of hope that maybe, just maybe, I'm not absolutely-for-sure-and-no-arguing-over-it going to die today—those feelings are withering fast.

The sacrifice has been the foundation of the world for time almost out of memory—they're not going to let some little nobody like me shake the world simply because I _decided_ not to die.

I know, deep down in that truest-instinct part of me, that I'm not going to be given a choice.

* * *

Vî'sid takes me out of my room as soon as I can no longer force the porridge down my throat. For the first time, I'm grateful that I've been given nothing more than that bland, sticky mush to eat. Even as it is, I'm worried about being sick on the floor.

We go through the still-dark garden and into the other side of the palace to the front door, where Elder Jí'als is waiting with two large slaves. He dismisses Vî'sid with a nod, then turns and pulls a ring of keys from a fold in his robe. He flips through them slowly, like they're pages of the sacred text, finds the one he wants—a large black one carved with a thousand decorative curls—and puts it into the lock. The door opens with a scrape of stone. The sound makes my blood run cold.

I believed Tí'ath when he said the lock on the front door was too much for his little knife, but I can see now how very true that is. A lock like that could snap things made from a lot sturdier metal than cutlery.

With the door open, I can see the whole town spread out at the bottom of the hill; the moon, round and bright, gives shape and size to all the buildings, the temple, the pattern of interlocking suns built in colored brick on the ground of the square. From somewhere in the distance, the shriek of a disturbed goldjay breaks the stillness.

For a moment, I think about running. Dodging the slaves' reaching hands and escaping from the palace. I'd do it, too, if only I though I'd have any chance of outrunning the slaves on legs weaker than water—which I think we all, slave and sacrifice and Sahnsor alike, know I don't. They don't even bother restraining me; one of them puts a firm hand on my shoulder and guides me down the steps, the other one walking on my other side with her hand half-raised as though she expects me to fall.

I'm tempted to try. I don't _think_ falling down the stairs would kill me, and, if it didn't, I'd certainly be in no shape to cleanse anyone from any sort of sin. It wouldn't be any trouble to make it look like an accident, either—I don't need help being clumsy, and the dangly ends of the robe and my own watery legs are more than willing to make the misstep, the trip-and-fall, happen even without me deciding to do it….

But there are a lot of stairs, and, even if it didn't kill me, falling down them would hurt. A lot. For a very long time.

There's another thought tickling in the back of my mind, one that's saying that it doesn't have tobe _me_ who goes tumbling down the stairs, that, if I push hard enough and fast enough, I could probably knock at least one of the slaves all the way down to the town square….

Maybe the slaves have some idea of the direction of those thoughts, or maybe they're obvious on my face, or maybe something about the way the palace door scrapes shut behind us makes them realize that they're the only things standing between me and some kind of rickety hope of escape; either way, both of them move in a little closer, and the one who didn't have her hand on me puts one on me now, as if saying, _If I go down, so do you._

(It's probably meant to say something more like, _There's no way to escape,_ but, in the end, those mean the same thing. It doesn't matter; I'm not going to push them anyway.)

* * *

Going down the stairs takes a lifetime, so it's hard to believe that it's still dark and moonlit when we reach the bottom. Four of the high priest's servants in their formal green tunics are waiting for us. They cross the square when we step off the stairs, trade a few muttered words with the slaves, then the slaves take two steps back from me, and the servants take their place.

"If you'll follow us," says one, a hard-faced woman with a mouth thinner than the point of a bareel spine. She wraps her fingers around my elbow and half-leads, half-drags me toward the temple.


	19. Chapter 19

We go in through a side door, directly into a room not much bigger than Mami's and my hut and mostly taken up by the hole cut into the floor. A fire burns in a hearth along the far wall, and several servants are using it to heat water in metal buckets and pour the water into the floor-hole. Steam rises from the water. The whole room smells like herbs, the soothing kind that Mami brews in tea when someone can't sleep.

The hard-faced servant dismisses the others who came with her to help the ones filling the floor-hole, but she herself stays beside me, holding my arm twisted loosely behind my back, I guess in case I get the idea of running off.

I know I should be panicky, desperate, but I'm not. Maybe it's the steam or the herbs or the faint prayer-chants of the servants tending the buckets—or pure, uncomplicated sleeplessness—but I don't, right now, feel much of anything, except maybe a little tired, and, by the time the floor-hole is full to the hard-faced servant's satisfaction, I'm stiff from standing still and practically asleep on my feet. My twisted-around arm aches dully at the elbow as she nudges me toward the hole. Two other servants strip me quickly of my robe, then all but the hard-faced one leave.

I poke the water with one toe. It's so hot I gasp and pull my foot out again, expecting to see it cooked like a clam dropped into a boiling pot, but the skin seems all right—maybe a little redder than normal, but not cooked—so I lower myself slowly into the hole without waiting to be told.

Once you get over the fear of being boiled like a clam, there's nothing so nice as a hot-water bath. They must've added something other than soothing herbs to the water, some kind of oil, maybe, because the water feels smooth and silky against my skin, and the sensation is so delicious that I wonder if maybe being killed today wouldn't be so bad, if only the high priest would perform the deed in this lovely water.

Unfortunately, I'm not left to enjoy my bath for very long; almost as soon as it becomes clear that I'm not going to be a problem, the hard-faced servant grabs my wrist and begins scrubbing my arm with a stiff-bristled brush like the kind I've seen the Hyte use to comb their camols' hair.

I jerk away as the rough bristles scrape my skin, but she just plucks my wrist back up and continues as if I hadn't moved. I pull at my arm again, but she doesn't lose her grip on my wrist. "That hurts," I say.

The brush moves up my arm and to my neck. She doesn't let go of my wrist again.

She scrubs every inch of my arms and back and chest, all the way down past my knees, and, when that's finally done, puts her hand on the top of my head. "Hold your breath," she says, then shoves my head under the water without giving me a chance to obey her. I come back up choking and coughing—whatever oil they put in the water may feel nice on my skin, but it tastes salty and burns my throat.

When I'm finally scrubbed raw and wet as a drowned duk, she decides I'm clean, pulls me out of the bath, and sets me in front of the blazing fire. There are several clay jars sitting on the mantel, each one elaborately painted with scenes from the sacred texts: Rí'ban calling fire down from the sky; Bí'ilm's talking camol being slaughtered on the point of Death's sword; the false king buying enchantments from the wasteland witch. There's even one of the first sacrifice, the bloodbath of Anami children painted like a decoration around the lip of the jar.

The servant takes one of the jars off the mantel—Bí'ilm's camol—and pulls out a bar of what looks like soap but smells like unripe bareel berries, cloying and poisonous. She grabs my wrist again and begins to rub the soap, hard, into my skin. It stings, especially where her scrubbing actually scraped away my skin, and it leaves greasy yellowish streaks behind it. I bite my lip and cringe visibly, but she ignores me. The soap, like her scrubbing, goes all over me, all the way down to my feet.

When she's finished, I have new pity for the fate of a duk, because I understand what it feels like to be skinned and cooked.

And then the servant turns away and walks out of the room, scooping up the robe I'd been wearing on her way out, leaving me alone and naked beside the fire.

The high priest comes in shortly after she leaves, as if he'd been waiting for her to go. He stands for a minute just inside the door, eyeing me speculatively, then comes around the bath toward me.

I've never been particularly shy of being uncovered, but something about the expression on the high priest's face as he looks at me makes me feel dirty despite the servant's vicious scrubbing. I step back, away from him, and wrap my arms around myself.

His lips tighten. "Anami Kalima," he says in his thunderclap voice.

It's strange to hear my name pronounced without a nasally accent and a tongue-click over the sharp sounds—I've gotten used to the way Tí'ath says it. I try to meet his eyes and fail, stare at the fire instead.

His examination of me is brief but thorough, a few quick passes of his hands down my limbs like a trader choosing an animal. Only once does he speak to me. "Have you ever laid with a man?"

Would saying yes make me unfit to be the sacrifice? Maybe, but my answer is already out. "No, sir."

"Mm." He turns me around and continues his inspection.

Eventually, he turns toward the hard-faced servant who comes in again with the ceremonial robe bundled under her arm. He mumbles a few words to her—I catch "acceptable" and "finish preparing" before he leaves, his sandals making soft clicking sounds as they flap against his heels.

* * *

The hard-faced servant has me again for a long time, rubbing more soaps and oils into my skin—though none of them hurt or smell as bad as that first dousing, and the last one is a sweet-smelling salve that does, in fact, soothe the stinging from my tender skin.

Then, once she's done with the oils and soaps, she picks up another of the clay jars on the mantel and pulls out a brush and a bottle of deep black ink. "Hold out your hands," she says, and I do. She grabs one of them by the fingers and pulls my whole arm toward her.

Then, beginning with the knuckles on my left hand, she begins to paint on me.

"What're you doing?" I ask.

She ignores me.

Her strokes are as delicate and precise as any artist, but also quick, and I suspect she's had a lot of practice with the symbols she's painting. They swirl from my knuckles to my wrist, up my arm, across my shoulders, onto my other arm. Twist along my breasts. Curl around my eyes and lips and ears, my throat and neck, both back and front. My forehead. My stomach. My back. My legs. By the end, only my palms and bottoms of my feet are ink-free.

I look at my arms after she finally steps back. They look so strange in this orange firelight, glowing softly from all the scrubbing and oiling, and covered with curled-up markings like an ancient language. She was careful that none of her symbols touch the exact center of my throat or the large veins that run down the underside of my arms, the places where the high priest's ceremonial knife will cut me open.

"What do they mean?" I ask.

My curiosity. Even now, it has to know.

The servant just looks at me.

"The symbols," I say, tracing one—a sort of tree-shape made of curls exploding with dots like seeds—on the fleshy part of my left hand between the thumb and forefinger. "They must mean something, or else why would you bother?"

She sighs, but then, to my surprise, she answers. "Below the waist is an old prayer for forgiveness." Her voice is bored.

I look down at my legs and feet. The lines of paint loop and twist over and around each other. "And above the waist?"

"A list of the sins committed in the last turn." She pauses, then adds, "Some are official sins, but there's always plenty of people paying to have personal sins added to the sacrifice."

I pull my fingers away from the symbol on my hand. "They _pay_ for it? With _coins_?"

The servant shrugs.

My throat fills with bile. "People actually do that? Divide me up and charge money for the best piece of skin?"

She shrugs again, as if the horribleness of that idea isn't even worth considering.

I think I'm going to be sick. I swallow hard and try to ignore the feeling.

The servant doesn't seem to notice; she picks up the ceremonial robe and shakes it out of its wrapping, not quite as smartly as the seamstress did, but with the same kind of well-practiced fluid motion, then wraps me up in it.

My pulse stutters in my ears. My life is no longer being measured in days or even hours.

I'm down to minutes.


	20. Chapter 20

Once the servant is satisfied with her work, she disappears through a different door than where the high priest came from, and, when she opens it, I can hear the sounds of the celebration out in the town square. I wait a minute to make sure she's really gone, then go over and try the door. It's not locked—the first time in ten days someone's left a door unlocked—so I open it a crack and slide through.

And nearly get knocked over by the noise.

A half-dozen different drums and yuppers play different tunes, turning the songs into a jumbled mess of beats and twangy melodies. A few people dance. Town men serve each other mugs of beer from vats scattered around the square; the women stand around in clumps, their laughing and gossiping occasionally punctuated by screams from children, their glass beads flashing like stars in the sunlight. The Sahnsor court is gathering and mingling at the bottom of the temple steps. At the back of the square, I see a few Anami being herded into their places. One of the high priest's servants checks them off as they come.

I don't see Mami. I wonder if she'll come by herself, or if she and Aunt Fikie will set aside their old argument for the day.

I hope the second; I don't want Mami alone for this.

All the bathing and painting and preparing took long enough that the suns are well up. The first sun has all but swallowed the second, and together they are unusually large. I remember the first time I was old enough to notice how big they got on this day—I'd thought they had come detached from the sky and were falling in on us, and Mami had to drag me kicking and screaming to the square because I was sure that if I set foot outside, the suns would flatten me.

I'm still not sure that it's not true, that the suns won't fall from the sky and flatten me, and, now that I'm older, I understand that it wouldn't just be me who was flattened if the suns fell—the entire world would be crushed.

I shiver and look back to the crowd and try to concentrate on the music, try to pick a single melody out of the jumble of notes.

That doesn't help, either.

Tí'ath and his friend are sitting on the steps on this side of the temple, apart from the court, both looking out over the town square. The friend taps the toes of his sandals in time with one of the drumbeats like he's getting bored. Tí'ath must feel my eyes on him, because after a moment, he glances over at me. I smile and lift one painted-on hand in greeting.

Something in his expression changes at that moment, the dragged-down parts stiffening with decision. He shoves himself to his feet, then turns when his friend copies the motion. Tí'ath clicks a few words to him, and I may not be able to understand Insect, but I understand the friend's reply:

No.

Tí'ath's answer is short and hard, and, as he says it, he turns away from his friend, his fingers closing into fists. "M'ei," the friend repeats, louder. He puts a restraining hand on Tí'ath's arm and holds on tight.

Tí'ath freezes, and, for a moment, I think he might let his friend turn him around and sit him back down. But then he sucks in a breath he doesn't immediately let out, whips around, and sends one balled-up fist flying like I saw him do once at the garden wall.

Only, this time, they connect, not with a wall of cold marble, but with the other man's nose.

* * *

My jaw pops open. The friend folds in half, his hands covering his face. Blood trickles through the space between his fingers.

Tí'ath spins around again and comes over to me. "Kalima," he says quietly.

"What…?"

"He deserves it."

No one else notices; the noise from the crowd, the singing and dancing and drinking, continues unbroken. The friend staggers away.

Tí'ath glances over in time to see him go, and his next breath comes out in a long string of angry clicks.

I slap my hand over my mouth, but that doesn't help. My laugh still bubbles up my throat even with my hand there to muffle it, a hysteria that's practically tears.

Tí'ath looks back at me, his eyes so hot that I wonder if he's thinking about punching me in the nose, too, but then the anger drains out of his face, and he smiles unsteadily. "I'm sorry," he says—for the swearing, I guess.

The elders turn at the sight of a Sahnsor with blood coming out of his nose. The space immediately surrounding them quiets.

And, just as quick as it came, the laugh is gone, sucked out of my throat by the friend's muffled clicking. My eyes flash up to the sky; the suns are too high, too big, their light turning a strange orange color. I drop my hand from over my mouth and let it fall back to my side, where it twists at a dangling end of sleeve.

Tí'ath takes half-a-step toward me and stops. "Kalima—"

"I'm okay," I interrupt, but the lump in my throat snags the words and turns them into lies.

He looks at me for the length of one long breath, then turns and reaches for a different side door than the one I came out of. He holds it open, and I slip through it.

* * *

He keeps his back to me as he shuts it, then stands in front of it with his forehead pressed against the wood.

The main part of the temple is huge—not bigger than the palace, but more open, one giant room with a ceiling ten times my height and a dozen narrow colored windows along each side. In the center is the only furnishing: the altar. Even that's huge, nearly as tall as I am and large enough that I could lay with all my limbs splayed and not reach any edges, with three wide steps wrapped all the way around it. It's made of marble, but the white has been stained over time with blood and smoke, and now it has patches of brown and gray scattered across it. A ceiling-hole like the ones in the palace shines sunlight onto the altar at just the exact time of the sacrifice—already most of the altar is covered in orangy light.

I look away, back to Tí'ath still leaning against the door. "Are you all right?"

I feel stupid even as the question comes out of my mouth. He's less all right than I am. Still, he turns slowly and smiles, the same kind of almost-not-there smile he gave me the day of the drawing when I first noticed him looking at me.

I take a few small steps toward him, setting myself almost within arm's-reach, and meet his eyes with all the boldness the hard-faced servant's preparations hadn't scrubbed out of me. I see his gaze trace the painted symbols around my eyes and across my forehead. Can he read them? Can he see in those symbols all the sins of this world, or do they look to him like they look to me, just lines of black ink on my brown skin? "This isn't goodbye," I say quietly, more to myself than him.

He doesn't look away from the symbols on my forehead. "I know," he says, but there's no hope in those words.

"You don't believe me?"

He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again, and I know that he doesn't. That he can't. That he knows more than anyone the kind of power the elders have to make things the way they want them, and that if they want me dead, then I'll die, and I'll die the way they decide I will, and they'll make him and Mami watch.

Oh.

It all comes together at that moment, like the way the designs in the stone of the town square did. I remember the several months when I was first old enough to come, when they were creating the ground in the square, the way it looked for a long time like just a jumble of brown and red and white rocks, and then, one day, it suddenly turned into a picture of the two suns throwing interlocking rays across the square. All those piles of dirty rock set together in the right way, and it makes a pattern. A picture. Everything planned. Everything _connected_.

I knew, before, that I hadn't been seeing the entire story, but I thought I figured it out. The elders want me dead because I upset the natural order of things just by existing. But…that's not it. It's true maybe, but, if they just wanted me dead, they could've killed me a long time ago, and without all the fuss and bother it must've caused to fix the drawing.

No, it's bigger than that. My death needs to be a public spectacle, even though most of the people watching don't have any idea that this is anything but the sacrifice, just life-as-normal—because Tí'ath knows it's not, and Mami would've figured it out the moment the high priest said my name, and that's what matters.

"This is for you, you and Mami, isn't it?" I ask, my voice hushed by realization.

Tí'ath bows his head and doesn't answer, and the fact that he doesn't deny it is more convincing than it would've been if he told me I'm right.

"The elders, when they found out about…." I swallow. "That's why they didn't execute all three of us the minute they found out. They wanted to see me sacrificed. They wanted _you_ to see me sacrificed." It's genius, really. Three things—me, the world's sins, and my parents' crime—taken care of with a few quick strokes of the high priest's knife.

I want to sit down, but there's nowhere to sit but the altar steps, and I'm not putting myself one toe closer to the altar.

From the other side of the front door, I hear clicking lifted above the muffled sounds of music and laughter, and the high priest's voice booming even over the clicking. "Brethren, if we may call for silence and reflect on the last turn…"

So. That's it, then. The whole story. The only thing left is aftermath.

My eyes wander toward the altar and linger there. I have it the easiest, I know—the cleanest ending, the least amount of pain.

But knowing that doesn't make it better.

"Kalima?"

My breaths come unevenly, breaking up in my throat like fast-moving river water torn apart by rocks.

I don't want Mami to see me sacrificed. I don't want Tí'ath to spend the rest of his life wrestling with all that guilt and heartbreak.

But, most of all, I don't want to die.

* * *

"Kalima, look at me."

It's the haste and desperation in Tí'ath's voice that breaks through my fear, and I rip my eyes off the altar to look at him. His face is scrunched up in the effort of not crying. "I want you to know that…that I loved you mami. That I still…." He stops, swallows hard, continues. "There are a lot of things I regret, but I never regretted knowing your mami, and I've never for one second regretted you. You are…." He takes half-a-step toward me and lifts one hand like he might touch me, but then stops himself, redirects his hand to instead wipe his eyes.

I close that last half-step between us and fling my arms around him.

"…So we take the time on this most sacred day to pause, reflect, and atone for all our great and sundry sins…"

* * *

I surprise him; for a moment, he just stands absolutely still, frozen stiff like he doesn't know what to do with a hug. But then something must've come back to him, because, after a second of shocked stillness, he lets out his breath in one huge trembling gust and wraps his arms around me.

I squeeze my eyes shut and bury my face into his robe, trying—unsuccessfully, I'm sure, because he must feel me shaking—to hide the fact that I'm crying, quietly but hard enough to break me apart, all the fear and confusion and uncertainty of the last ten days crashing full-weight on top of me, and the only reason I'm not crumbling under it is because he's standing here holding me up.

His arms tighten. "I love you, Kalima," he whispers in my ear, his voice raw. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

"…We invite you, brethren, to join us in our holy ceremony…"


	21. Chapter 21

He's the first to pull away, and he does it suddenly and completely—not because he really wants to, I think, but more like he doesn't want me to have to. I'm still crying; I rub the wetness off my cheeks with the fleshy part of my palms and force myself to breathe.

The high priest has changed from translating to praying, and I know that my time has gone from minutes to seconds. "…As we come to you, our great and powerful Eí'ris…"

"I'm sorry," Tí'ath says again. "I should've never…I…." His head drops into one hand, and he scrubs at his forehead like he wants to rub off his skin. "I'm sorry, don't mind me. You should…."

I should be ready at the altar when the high priest finishes his prayer and opens the doors. I start to turn toward the altar, then stop before I've even moved my feet. "Tí'ath?" I do it with the click, and it actually comes out right.

He looks up.

What is there to say? I want to tell him that it's not his fault, that even if I do die, well, everyone does in the end, that his kindness has made the last ten days of my life so much better than I was expecting. That not everyone is as fortunate as I am to have a papi who loves them—and that I certainly never thought mine did, and I'm so grateful that I was wrong about that. I try to make words come, but they all get stuck in my throat, and then the front doors of the temple scrape open. I whirl around and lose my chance to say anything at all.

The suns are directly overhead, throwing most of the temple into deep shadow and making the altar almost glow under its ceiling-hole. The high priest is standing on the steps outside the temple, facing the crowd; he turns halfway toward me and gestures me forward, as if he expects me to be exactly where I am.

I walk toward him numbly, and he puts a hand in the center of my back and pushes me forward to the edge of the top step so that I'm standing before him and the massive white temple like a drop of blood on a pale hand.

"I present to you once more the sacrifice," the high priest says to the crowd, "she who will stave off the wrath of our great and powerful Eí'ris for another turn, the Anami Kalima."

The square fills with cheers. Some people lift glasses in a spontaneous toast or hands in a spontaneous worship. Only the Anami in their own little corner are quiet, watching and not participating.

And then, at last, I see Mami. She's near the back of the knot of Anami, one dark face in the small island of dark faces, and the face closest to her is Aunt Fikie. Good. I'm glad she doesn't have to be here alone.

One of the servants goes inside the temple briefly and returns with the book of sacred texts in his hands, the very book written by Rí'ban himself that only comes out of its protective box for this one day every turn. I've heard that one of the high priest's servants—maybe this one?—has no other job but to care for the book, touching up the words when they fade, oiling the pages when they get dry, and keeping it company when all other care-tasks are done as if it's a living thing that must be watched over always.

The high priest takes it from the servant's hands with the same sort of delicacy the seamstress used handling the ceremonial robe. "Behold, the words of our great god Eí'ris," he announces to the crowd and flips the book open, turning pages with hands gentle as a lover's. The thin leather crackles.

He reads the same passage every time—surely by now he has it memorized. But he still goes through the ritual of turning the pages, one at a time. Drawing it out the same way he draws out the moment of reading the sacrifice's name. He smiles in the tense hush that falls over the crowd. He enjoys this, these cruel minutes of lingering.

Finally, he finds the page he wants and looks up at the crowd. "Hear the words of our great god Eí'ris," he calls out. "From the scared texts."

He reads the passage.

* * *

_The ground trembled and the river boiled under the wrath of EÍ'RIS. HE smote the people with a breath from HIS mouth; HE darkened the suns with a twitch of HIS brow. They cried aloud, "Protect us, our goddesses—Sigant and Tazareen, Balli and Morta!"_

_Then Rí'ban, high priest of EÍ'RIS, mocked them, "What, are your goddesses asleep? Cry louder, perhaps they are busy and cannot hear you."_

_The people gnashed their teeth and tore their hair. "What must we do to end these horrors?" asked they._

_Rí'ban spoke unto them, delivering the words of EÍ'RIS, "Worship ME alone, and to ME dedicate your children, sacrificing them to MY will, so MY wrath may be appeased."_

_The people brought their children to Rí'ban and said, "Do as EÍ'RIS commands and end these plagues. We worship HIM alone, and to HIM we give our children."_

_Then Rí'ban, high priest of EÍ'RIS, sacrificed the children on the altar built of stones, and blood ran as the river._

* * *

"These are the words of our great god Eí'ris. Amen." He closes the book carefully, letting the pages creak faintly against each other as he does.

Hands go up. A few people echo his amen.

"According to them, we now dedicate our sacrifice. The Anami Kalima has been found suitable by the laws and traditions of our elders and stands before you now fit to appease the great and terrible wrath of Eí'ris." He turns to me suddenly, meets my eyes. "She rejoices in this glorious appointment, and we rejoice with her."

Glorious? Rejoices? Can he hear himself?

The crowd cheers again. More hands go up, and the ones already up reach higher toward the sky, splayed fingers stretching as though they want to leave their hands entirely.

The high priest swings out an arm, gesturing me toward the temple doors, but I can't remember how I've been able all my life to make myself move. My body feels like stone—completely immobile.

The high priest doesn't show any signs of irritation, only stands there with his arm out as though he's perfectly willing to wait all afternoon for me, but I doubt he would be if I actually put that patience to the test. Already, I can feel a pressure at my back, the high priest's servants closing around me, not pushing exactly, but standing there and staring at me until their eyes are as strong as a shove. One servant prods my shoulder with an impatient finger, hard enough to hurt, and my legs shift under me automatically to keep myself from stumbling.

Oh, that's right. That's how those works.

My joints creak like an old woman's, but I'm able to separate my legs from the rest of me, remember which things I have to do to make them go forward in a straight line, and I move in front of the high priest back into the temple. He follows me, leaving the doors open so the crowd in the square can watch.

The court has already filed in through the side door, and they all, even the wives, shift around when me and the high priest come in, eager to have a good view. They've given Tí'ath an excellent spot, of course, right up front with no one blocking his view of the altar. Another green-hemmed Sahnsor stands by his side, holding his shoulder in a grip that would look friendly if you can't see the anger clenching Tí'ath's jaw and darkening his eyes. The other green-hem is old, with patchy white hair and a hump in his back, but he holds himself like he's very aware of his own importance. I don't see the redheaded friend in my hasty once-over.

The servants who herded me forward with their stares move back toward the door, ready to grab me, I guess, if I try to run. But I can't run, not in the ceremonial robe, not on legs with as much feeling as rock. I wouldn't make it three steps if I tried.

One of them goes to the high priest. There's a box in her hand, made of marble inlaid with beads of gold. She kneels before the high priest and opens it for him, and even the elders flinch when he plucks the ceremonial knife off its bed of red silk.

The knife is every bit as wicked as I've been nightmaring about, as long as the distance from the bottom of my wrist to the end of my longest finger and no wider than my thumb, but so sharp that its edges are almost transparent. Its handle is whiter than the elders' robes.

The high priest tilts back his head and examines the light coming in through the ceiling-hole. "Anami Kalima," he says in his booming-thunder voice, "take your place on the altar."

My eyes flicker toward the door, out toward the crowd, who watch me with strained excitement on their faces, then back to the knife, its whiter-than-white handle blazing in the sunlight reflecting off the altar.

What am I doing? No one questions the sacrifice. Not ever.

Maybe it's time someone did.

"Anami Kalima," the high priest repeats. "Take your place on the altar."

My legs are rock, but I'm still able to step back, away from the altar and the high priest, one step, two steps, three, and, surprisingly, no one tries to stop me.

Every eye of the court and in the crowd is on me, making the skin on my neck cringe, but I look only at Tí'ath. He's watching me, the expression on his face so unfamiliar on him that it takes me a moment to decide what it is.

Hope.

Hope so fierce and unexpected that it drowns out pain and despair and even fear.

And it's that hope that brings back all my determination to live.

* * *

Everyone's still looking at me, waiting for me to do as the high priest said and take my place on the altar so he can cut me open and bleed my life across the sins painted on my face and neck and arms. The hush that has fallen over everyone as they wait is such that, when I answer him, though I don't raise my voice particularly, the word bounces off the temple walls and out to the town square, maybe even as far as where Mami and Aunt Fikie and the other Anami are watching.

One word. Maybe no one's ever said it to these people.

"No."


	22. Chapter 22

For a long, long moment, no one moves or speaks or even breaths so far as I can tell, and the silence rings louder than a shout through the square. Then, murmurs.

They start in the crowd, soft whispers too low to hear if they're attached to words, rippling out first in one direction, then the other, until the entire town square is filled with people murmuring to each other. The court joins, too, so the indistinct hum of townfolk voices is undercut with the sharp sounds of Insect.

The high priest blinks a few times, shaking off his shock. "I beg your pardon?"

"No," I repeat, my voice stronger to be heard over the crowd. "I won't take my place on the altar. I won't be your sacrifice."

The humming from the crowd gets louder. Someone somewhere shouts.

And then, everyone is shouting. Protests, demands, curses—they lose their particularity in the jumble. I clench my teeth and swallow the hot saliva in my mouth. It adds to the sloshiness of my stomach, but I clench my teeth harder and try to ignore it.

Elder Jí'als steps forward and holds up one hand, palm out. It's obviously meant to be a quieting gesture, but the crowd's too worked up for it to do any good. He pulls in a breath. "Silence!" he roars.

Everyone goes quiet, quickly and completely.

"Thank you." He switches back to Insect; the high priest translates, but without the usual boom in his voice. "Fear not, brethren," he says, "the sacrifice does not have the power to refuse her duty."

I suppose I knew that, so why does hearing it feel like a surprise?

The high priest nods once, and the servants hovering around the door collapse in on me. Two grab my arms, and a third follows behind with a hand on the middle of my back. They drag me toward the altar.

Panic brings back the energy that had been zapped away by the shouting. I lock my knees and lean hard against the servants holding me, struggling to dig my feet into something, but the smooth marble floor gives my feet nothing to dig against, and I skid across it like I'm being dragged across ice. When we reach the steps, another servants picks my feet up at the ankles.

I kick out at him, but he's already got my legs tight in his grip, and I don't make contact. They carry me up the three steps to the altar-top and lay me down across it. I thrash against them, trying to yank a limb free so I can punch or kick the rest of them. My throat is sore, and I realize I'm screaming. No words, just a scream.

More servants come around the edge of the altar, brace themselves against my shoulders and arms and legs. One mashes a hand over my mouth. I bite him, hard enough to break skin, but he just winces and pushes harder against my face. My jaw creaks in protest. Blood coats my tongue. I don't know if it's his or mine.

The high priest mounts the steps, stands over me, and brings the knife gently to the hollow at the base of my throat. The blade tickles as it touches my skin.

"'Worship ME alone, and to ME dedicate your children, sacrificing them to MY will, so MY wrath may be appeased,'" the high priest whispers. He turns the knife so the edge of the blade exactly follows the angle of my throat.

I struggle again, but weakly, afraid of slicing open my throat on my own—I can feel the knife like a single white-hot hair barely brushing my skin. It does no good anyway; there's too many servants, and they're all too strong. Tears leak out from the corners of my eyes, down my temples, into my hair. I squeeze my eyes shut.

* * *

The suns are warm on my face. I'll never feel the suns again. Never squish river mud between my toes or eat a bucket of clams or listen to Mami tell stories. I imagine my world with its big sky and muddy river and endless sweep of gold-brown sand—it's vicious to the weak and unfair to the rest, but I love it anyway.

The blade presses into my throat. I can feel it parting the skin just above my collarbone. It doesn't hurt, like cutting yourself on something so sharp that it takes you a minute to realize you'd been cut at all, but the feeling of the blade entering my skin is vivid enough.

I concentrate on the warmth of the suns.

* * *

There's sounds from the court. Rustling. A few clicks, quiet and urgent. A thump. More clicks, louder this time, with a panicky edge. Footsteps.

Then, suddenly, the white-hot, hair-thick awareness of the knife is gone, and a voice echoes through the temple.

"Let her go."


	23. Chapter 23

My eyes snap open; the suns glare at me and make focusing through my tears that much harder. I blink and squint and am able to see a little. The high priest's servants, still grim-faced and determined, are pinning me to the altar, but they aren't looking at me; their eyes have gone up toward the high priest, to the spot just below his ear where his own ceremonial knife threatens to cut him open.

The elders are all clicking, fast and loud. The noise makes me shudder all the way down to my bones. One detaches himself from the blurred wall of whiteness and takes a few steps forward.

"Stay back, or I'll see _you_ sacrificed for our sins." The voice is Tí'ath's, but so dark and distorted that I almost don't recognize it. The knife flicks for a second away from the high priest to glint threateningly at the elder.

The elder backs up again, so fast that he stumbles over the hem of his robe.

Tí'ath turns, keeping the knife at the same spot under the high priest's ear, and faces the servants holding me. "Let her go."

The servants look at each other. The one with a hand mashed against my mouth flexes his fingers.

Tí'ath takes a step in toward the high priest, twisting the knife. The high priest swallows so hard I can hear it. "I said, let her go."

"Do it," the high priest squeaks.

The servants jerk their hands off me as though I've suddenly caught fire and scuttle backward, down the altar steps, all their eyes still locked on the knife.

"Kalima?"

For a moment, I can't move; all my muscles feel weak as water. Something warm trickles down the side of my neck. When I'm able to put my hand to where the knife rested on my skin, my fingertips come away bloody. My breath breaks out of me as a sob.

Tí'ath lowers the knife and comes up to the edge of the altar and puts his empty hand on my cheek. "Kalima, are you all right? Did he hurt you?"

I reach up and grab his hand. I can't answer—when I try, all that comes out are sobs.

He runs his thumb across my forehead, a little too fast to be soothing. "All right, you're all right now, I won't let anything happen to you," he promises in a shaky whisper.

"Sahnsor Tí'ath, step away from the altar."

* * *

There's something especially sinister about an elder speaking in the common tongue. Like he wants everyone, even the crowd in the town square, even me, to hear and understand him.

Tí'ath turns around slowly. His hand slides off my face, but he takes a better grip on my fingers and holds on tight. I force my other arm underneath me and prop myself up on one elbow. The effort leaves me shaking and exhausted.

"Sahnsor Tí'ath, you have threatened the high priest of our great god Eí'ris. You will relinquish the knife and submit yourself to the custody of the elderhood," the elder says.

"Go to Oxx," Tí'ath snarls back.

The elder laughs lightly like he's amused, but the sound is harsh. "Do you really think you can fight us?"

"Do you really want to see me try?"

The elder nods to the others beside him, and three of them take a step forward.

"Stay _back_!"

Everyone flinches—the elders, the high priest and all his servants, even me. I've never been afraid of Tí'ath before, not after the drawing when he looked at me and smiled, not when I was wondering if his kindness was a put-on. Not even when he said, _You're my daughter,_ and those three words changed everything I ever thought I knew about my papi, my world, and even myself. Even then, as he was proving wrong everything I ever knew, I wasn't afraid of him. Not of him.

I'm afraid of him now, of the fury pouring out of him, of the loss and madness in his voice. Sixteen turns of near solitary confinement, of living with all that pain—maybe it has unhinged him, and he's just spent the last ten days hiding the extent of it from me.

"If I may, brothers?"

Another elder detaches himself from the group and toes the invisible line Ti'ath won't let anyone cross. Tí'ath stiffens at the sound of his voice. The point of the knife tilts out a little further; the hand closed around mine tightens a little more.

Elder Jí'als doesn't seem to notice or care. He just looks at Tí'ath and sighs. "What exactly do you hope to accomplish, then? Do you want us to step down and leave these people in anarchy? To allow soulless river filth to mob-rule our peaceful world?"

"Enough."

The elder's eyes flicker to me and back up. "She's filth." He says the words without heat. Just a statement of fact. "They all are."

Then, with no more warning than a rustle of robes and a high-pitched shriek from the elder, Tí'ath has dropped my hand and pinned him against the nearest wall, one fist gripping the front of the his robe and the other pressing the knife sideways beneath his jaw. "She's my _daughter_, you Oxx-suckled swak!"

Those words crack the stillness in the court—not enough for anyone to really move, but enough for a twitch of white robes, a glance passed down the line. Apparently, that little fact was never common knowledge.

I sit up. My head is woozy, but I brace my arms underneath me and don't fall back.

Elder Jí'als holds up his hands, palm out, like he's looking to make peace. "Now, now, you want to think about this. Tí'ath…son…."

Tí'ath tilts his head back and laughs up at the ceiling. "Oh, so now I'm your son?"

"You've always—"

"Be careful what you say, old man. The entire world can understand you." The knife breaks skin; a drop of blood rolls down the elder's pale neck.

Elder Jí'als makes a strange sound in his throat, a dry, panicky sob. "Please, you don't want to do this."

"Don't I?" The knife slides another inch. A second drop of blood rolls toward the elder's robe, and he sobs again.

I swing my feet off the edge of the altar and stand, still gripping the stone to support my shaking legs. "No, you don't." My voice is quiet and shaking almost harder than my knees. I pull in a breath and concentrate for a moment on gathering up all my shaking and sobbing as though it was someone else's and pushing it down toward my toes. Not all of it goes, but enough does that I'm able to step away from the altar.

Nobody moves, not to stop me, not to look at me.

I make it to Tí'ath's side without tripping, reach up, and put my hand over his. Even balled into a fist over the knife handle, I can feel his fingers shivering. "Put the knife down."

He doesn't move.

There's so much pain and fear and anger in him that I don't even have to reach for it; it practically slaps me in the face. I don't pull on it, but I don't ignore it, either. I just let it be and instead try to send a little bit of calmness through my fingers and into Tí'ath's hand in a sort of backwards easing. "You don't want to do this," I whisper. "You aren't like them. Please, put the knife down."

He looks at me now, the anger leaking out of his face. His arm relaxes, just barely at first, but then, all at once he shoves himself away from Elder Jí'als, who crumples dry-sobbing to the floor.

He drops the knife; it clatters on the marble floor, and the sound echoes through the silent temple like a struck bell. "Filth," he says, spitting the word down at the blubbering elder. He whirls on the rest of the court. They're all watching him with wide eyes, not moving. "Filth," he repeats, louder. "If she is filth, then what are you?"

I reach for his hand and look at the court, meeting the elders' eyes one at a time. They all look away.

We leave silently, letting his question hang in the temple air.

_What are you?_


	24. Chapter 24

The crowd parts as we leave the temple as though for an angry wasteland mutt. The murmurs start up again, quieter now, subdued. Eyes follow us, expressions nervous, wary, some even angry or afraid. Somewhere on the other side of the square, someone whimpers.

What have we done?

I try to put the thought aside, then, when it won't go quietly, I try to answer it. I'm not dead. I was pinned on the altar with the high priest's ceremonial knife at my throat—my free hand goes up to the cut above my collarbone; touching it makes it sting, but already the bleeding's mostly stopped—but I'm still breathing, still standing, and not even in danger of losing too much blood.

We've done the impossible: questioned the sacrifice, questioned the elders—and survived.

But, as I look around at the townfolk with their eyes full of suspicion and anger and fear, I wonder what else might've just happened.

Tí'ath notices them, too; his hand tightens around mine, and he offers a defiant glare to anyone who'll look at him. All that metal-melting rage has burned down to coals, but those coals are still plenty full of fire, waiting for someone to toss kindling on them.

I concentrate on sending what last little shreds of calm I have down through my hand.

"Kalima!" A voice shouts over the uneasy murmurs of the crowd, and Mami's shoving her way up from the back of the square, and I forget about everything, drop Tí'ath's hand, and run to her.

She catches me with both arms and hugs me so fiercely that my feet come off the ground; I wrap my legs around her waist and press my face into her shoulder. She smells like mud and smoke and water, like evenings spent around the fire telling stories or splashing in the river. Like home. I breathe hard between my sobs and think about how there's no smell in the world I could ever love more.

Mami strokes my hair, rubs my back. "It's okay, baby. I've got you, you're okay," she whispers in my ear, her voice breaking in tears over every sound. "You're safe now."

Only when I hear her say so do I begin to believe it.

* * *

It takes several minutes, but the tears eventually slow. I unwrap my legs from around Mami's waist and hold myself up with my own two feet, but I stay leaning against her, letting her prop me up. She holds my head to her chest and rocks us gently back and forth, and it's several more long moments before I can think of anything else.

When I finally am able to look up, I see Tí'ath standing several steps away, hesitating like he started to follow my mad dash to Mami and then abruptly stopped himself. The Anami around him keep their eyes on the ground and skirt around him like he might bite—which reminds me what I've somehow managed to forget, that contact between Anami and Sahnsor is forbidden.

How could I forget that? But, somehow, I have.

Mami looks up at him, too, and I can _feel_ the moment their eyes meet, feel it in the sudden hitch in her breath and the way the rhythm of her heart under my cheek unsteadies. But she looks away without a word, just like everyone else.

I step back. "Don't tell me I need to introduce you two."

Tí'ath smiles one of those full smiles, maybe the fullest smile I've ever seen on him. "Henna," he says quietly, his voice strained.

Mami's eyes flicker up to him and away again.

He starts to step toward her, makes it one half-step forward, and stops, rocking impatiently on his toes. "It's…good to see you again. I didn't think I'd ever be so fortunate."

_Say something! _I have to bite my lip near to bleeding to keep myself from shouting at her.

But Mami only nods, one quick little nod that's not agreement, that's barely even acknowledgment, then looks at me. "Let's go home, baby," she says, barely above a whisper.

I glance over at Tí'ath. The slump is back in his shoulders. "But—"

"No, it's all right," he interrupts. "I'll go." He starts to turn around but pauses, reaches out with one hand, and runs his fingers across my forehead, pushing back a few of the little braids that had fallen in front of my face. His eyes travel again over the symbols on my forehead. "You're beautiful, Kalima," he says.

My face gets hot, but I don't look away. "Thank you," I whisper. "And…not just for that. For everything. If I could've picked my papi out of every man in the world, I would've picked you."

He squeezes his eyes shut a moment and sucks in a breath, then looks at me and smiles faintly. He touches his lips to the top of my head for the length of one long exhale before turning the rest of the way around and walking away.

* * *

Or, rather—starting to walk away. He hasn't made it two steps when Mami's eyes flash up. She bounds after him, grabs his sleeve, spins him back around to face her.

And then she kisses him.

Which makes this the second time today that he's been attacked like that, but he doesn't seem to mind; after the first second of surprise, his eyes close, and his hands come up to hold her face.

I press my knuckles to my lips and tell myself not to laugh, though my smile's big enough to have its own house.

After a moment, Mami pulls away—a very little away, just enough to have use of her lips again. "Stay with us. Please. We've already lost you once, I can't, I just _can't_ do it again."

"Of course. Of course, Henna, of course."

They kiss again.

And then Tí'ath opens his arms to me. I go to him, and he wraps his arms around me and holds me tight, like he's thinking that maybe he just won't ever let go.

That'd be okay. We have sixteen turns to make up for.

* * *

**Author's Note: Thank you to everyone reading and commenting. Feedback leads to new ideas, which leads to editing, which leads to an increasingly-better story.  
**


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